Rivolta Femminile, Carla Accardi, Marta Lonzi: Feminism, Art and Architecture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Italy

RIVOLTA FEMMINILE, CARLA ACCARDI, MARTA LONZI: FEMINISM, ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALY

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

KÜBRA NESRİN ERDOĞAN

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE

OCTOBER 2019

Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences

Prof. Dr. Yaşar Kondakçı Director

I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.

Prof. Dr. Cânâ Bilsel Head of Department

This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.

Prof. Dr. Belgin Turan Özkaya Supervisor

Examining Committee Members

Assist. Prof. Dr. Esin Kömez Dağlıoğlu (METU, ARCH)

Prof. Dr. Belgin Turan Özkaya (METU, AH)

Assist. Prof. Dr. Giorgio Gasco (Bilkent Uni., ARCH)

I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work.

Name, Last name : Kübra Nesrin Erdoğan

Signature :

iii

ABSTRACT

RIVOLTA FEMMINILE, CARLA ACCARDI, MARTA LONZI: FEMINISM, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALY

ERDOĞAN, Kübra Nesrin M.A., Department of History of Architecture Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Belgin Turan Özkaya

October 2019, 186 pages

Since mid-twentieth-century Italy was undergoing a paradigm shift due to the larger industrialization and modernization processes which consequently had its reflections upon society in the form of intersecting political, social, and cultural movements. Accordingly, this shift triggered some critical attitudes towards conventional gender roles, requiring new definitions of women’s identity against the prevailing social norms. Within this context, this thesis focuses on Rivolta Femminile, one of the newly emerged feminist collectives of the 1970s that contributed to the Italian feminist discourse considerably, and examines the imprints of its underpinning concepts on the spatial and theoretical productions of two of its members: the artist Carla Accardi and the architect Marta Lonzi.

Delving into the tensions emerged between feminism, art, and architecture, the habitable art environments of Carla Accardi charged with implications of alternative domesticity and Marta Lonzi’s criticism of ‘modern architects’ and architectural canons constitute the core of the study. Even though the analysis of the feminist

positions of the cases with respect to their productions is the essential point of discussion, a general scenery of the Italian landscape of the 1960s and 1970s is also presented in order to locate the contributions of these two women within architectural history and within the general political and social climate of Italy during that period. Therefore, this thesis is a portrayal of the distinct influences of a particular feminist collective on the design processes and production of space and aims at restating the visibility of those spaces and processes together with their protagonists in historiography.

Keywords: Rivolta Femminile, Carla Accardi, Marta Lonzi, Italian feminism, feminist art and architecture

ÖZ

RIVOLTA FEMMINILE, CARLA ACCARDI, MARTA LONZI: YİRMİNCİ YÜZYIL ORTALARINDA İTALYA’DA FEMİNİZM, SANAT, VE MİMARLIK

ERDOĞAN, Kübra Nesrin Yüksek Lisans, Mimarlık Tarihi Bölümü Tez Yöneticisi: Prof. Dr. Belgin Turan Özkaya

Ekim 2019, 186 sayfa

Feminizm, sanat ve mimarlık arasındaki gerginliği derinlemesine araştıran çalışmanın merkezinde Carla Accardi’nin alternatif evsellik ve ev yaşamı düşüncelerini yansıtan sanat ürünü mekânları ve Marta Lonzi’nin modern mimarlara ve mimari kanonlara yönelik eleştirisi yer alıyor. Her ne kadar tartışmanın odak noktasını, Accardi ve Lonzi’nin feminist duruşlarının üretimleriyle ilişkili çözümlenmesi oluşturuyor olsa da mimarlık tarihine ve genel olarak İtalya’nın sosyal ve politik hayatına yaptıkları

katkıları netleştirmek amacıyla 1960 ve 1970’lerin İtalya’sının genel bir manzarası da çizilmekte. Böylelikle, bu çalışma önemli bir feminist kolektifin tasarım süreçlerine ve mekân üretimine yönelik bıraktığı belirgin etkiyi, bu mekânları, süreçleri ve aktörleri tarih yazımında görünür hale getirmeyi hedefliyor.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Rivolta Femminile, Carla Accardi, Marta Lonzi, İtalyan feminizmi, feminist sanat ve mimarlık

vii

To every marginalized person in historiography,

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Belgin Turan Özkaya for her inspirational critiques and academic guidance, yet, above all, for her kindest sympathy and encouragements throughout this study. It is always a great pleasure to learn from her. I wish to thank the jury members Assist. Prof. Dr. Esin Kömez and Assist. Prof. Dr. Giorgio Gasco for their insightful comments including suggestions for further studies in the future.

I owe special thanks to Raffaella Poletti, the archivist of Marta Lonzi Archive in Elvira Badaracco Foundation in Milan, for kindly sharing the materials when the archive was still in progress; and, Caterina Franchini for helping me access important sites of knowledge during my time in Politecnico di Torino.

I am thankful to my beloved friends Nihal Evirgen, Burcu Eryılmaz, Berçem Kaya, Deniz Beyaz, Ayça Orhon and Pınar Yalçınkaya simply for being my family in Ankara; Elif Bilge and Zeynep Gür for their empathy and support in my times of frustration. I am also indebted to my dear friend Eyüp Özkan for all the colors he added to my life and for always believing in me even when I was in doubt.

I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents, Hatice and Muammer Erdoğan, for their endless love and support in every aspect of my life. Last but not least, many thanks to my favorite person on earth, my sister, Esra Erdoğan. Nothing feels worthy unless I share the joy with her.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PLAGIARISM...... iii ABSTRACT ...... iv ÖZ ...... vi DEDICATION ...... viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... x LIST OF FIGURES ...... xii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1.Some Reflections on the Recognition and Self-representation of Women architects in the 1960s and 1970s ...... 5 2. SETTING THE GENERAL ITALIAN LANDSCAPE IN THE 1960s AND 1970s ...... 13 2.1. The Political and Social Transformations ...... 13 2.2. The Protest Cycle ...... 16 2.2.1. The Student’s Movement and The Faculties of Architecture ... 17 2.2.2. From Faculties into Factories: Workers’ Movement and the Alliance with Students ...... 21 2.3. Italian Feminisms ...... 24 2.3.1. The ‘Presence’ of the First Wave Italian Feminism ...... 26 2.3.2. The Context of the ‘New’ Italian Feminisms of the 1970s ...... 31 2.3.2.1. Feminist Manifestoes ...... 33 3. SETTING THE PARTICULARS ...... 39 3.1. AIDIA (The Association of Italian Women Engineers and Architects) ...... 39 3.2. Rivolta Femminile ...... 50 3.2.1. The Notion of Autoscienza ...... 54

3.2.2. Feminists’ Production and Appropriation of Space ...... 56 4. AN ALTERNATIVE DOMESTICITY: CARLA ACCARDI’S HABITABLE ART ENVIRONMENTS...... 64 4.1. Arte Povera and The Habitable Art Phenomenon...... 76 4.2. Representation of a Nomadic Way of Living ...... 85 4.3. The Possibility of Feminist Landscapes ...... 98 5. A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN GENIUS: MARTA LONZI ...... 107 5.1. The Rejection of the Current Cultural Canon ...... 127 5.2. Creative Design Process of Architects ...... 131 5.2.1. Sublimation vs Authenticity ...... 141 5.2.2. Female Subjectivity in the Creative Process ...... 152 6. CONCLUSION ...... 157 REFERENCES ...... 164 APPENDICES A. TURKISH SUMMARY/ TÜRKÇE ÖZET ...... 175 B. TEZ İZİN FORMU / THESIS PERMISSION FORM ...... 186

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURES Figure 1.1a, b, c Elvira Badaracco Foundation and Marta Lonzi Archive, Milan. ... 10 Figure 2.1 The First Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile distributed in Rome, 1970. ... 35 Figure 3.1 The photograph of Maria Artini on the cover of the book entitled AIDIA 60, ed. Amelia Lentini (Milan:Edizioni d'Este, 2017)...... 40 Figure 3.2 The portrait of Emma Strada, the first woman graduate in Civil Engineering in Italy and the first president of AIDIA...... 45 Figure 3.3 Photograph of Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, taken by Pietro Consagra...... 50 Figure 3.4 Maria Grazia Chinese, Marta Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, Anna Piva, Renata Gessner, Adriana Bottini and Carla Lonzi, members of Rivolta Femminile in Turicchi, 1975...... 52 Figure 3.5 Carla Lonzi, Anna Jaquinta, Marta Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, meeting at Marta Lonzi’s house in Rome, 1977...... 54 Figure 3.6 House meeting at Marta Lonzi’s house in Rome, 1977. Anna Jaquinta, Carla Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, Marta Lonzi...... 57 Figure 3.7a, b Photographs of Carla Lonzi’s house where several group meetings were held, Rome...... 58 Figure 3.8 Members of Rivolta Femminile at the house of Jacqueline Vodoz, October 1976. Angela de Carlo, Carla Lonzi, Renata Gessner, Franca Capalbi, Anna Piva, Adriana Bottini, Marta Lonzi, Maria Grazia Chinese, Anna Jaquinta, Maria Delfino appear in the photograph...... 59 Figure 3.9 Some Rivolta members in 1972, Rome in Maria Grazia Chinese, La Strada Piu Lunga (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1976)...... 61 Figure 3.10 The cover of “Sputiamo su Hegel,” the first book Scritti di Rivolta Femminile published ...... 62 Figure 3.11 Marta Lonzi, Cover layout for L’architetto fuori di sé, 1982. Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive at Fondazione Elvira Badaracco, Milan...... 62

xii

Figure 4.1 La Tenda, first exhibited in Turin in 1966. The tent is made up of thirty- six painted panels out of the plastic material sicofoil...... 65 Figure 4.2 Ambiente Arancio, 1966-68. The suit consists of a plastic umbrella, a bed with a plastic hood, and seven wooden stretchers wrapped in sicofoil sheets...... 65 Figure 4.3 Triplice Tenda, paint on Sicofoil, 270.9 x 451cm ...... 66 Figure 4.4 Photograph of Forma 1 artists, Rome, 1947...... 67 Figure 4.5 Carla Accardi, Labirinto Negativo, 1954 ...... 68 Figure 4.6 Carla Accardi with her daughter Antonella and her husband Antonio Sanfilippo, Rome, 1964 ...... 68 Figure 4.7 Photograph of Carla Accardi’s studio in Rome, 1965...... 69 Figure 4.8 Carla Accardi’s Rotoli at Galeria Notizie in Turin, 1965...... 69 Figure 4.9 Photograph of Carla Accardi and Carla Lonzi...... 71 Figure 4.10 Carla Accardi at her exhibition at Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, 1967. ... 72 Figure 4.11 Carla Lonzi with the Italian artist Enrico Castellani at the exhibition of Carla Accardi at Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, 1966...... 75 Figure 4.12 The photograph of Tenda (Tent) at the Venice Biennale of 1976...... 77 Figure 4.13 Mario Merz’ Igloo di Giap, 1968...... 80 Figure 4.14 Carla Accardi in her studio in Rome, Triplice Tenda (Triple Tent) in progress, 1970...... 81 Figure 4.15 Photograph showing the students’ demonstrations in Venice Biennale of 1968, taken by the photographer Ugo Mulas...... 83 Figure 4.16 Mario Merz’s Igloo, Che Fare (What is to be done?), 1969 ...... 84 Figure 4.17 Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer, 1926. “a visualization of a new, nomadic way of living, based on transience and instability rather than permanence and rootedness.” ...... 87 Figure 4.18 Another version of Ambiente Arancio 1967 in the 1997 exhibition entitled Tele-carti...... 88 Figure 4.19 Superstudio, A Journey from A to B, 1969...... 89 Figure 4.20a, b The inflatable objects of the Florence based group UFO (Carlo Bachi, Lapo Binazzi, Patrizia Cammeo, Riccardo Foresi, Titti Maschietto

xiii

with, initially, Sandro Gioli and, temporarily, Massimo Giovannini and Mario Spinella), Casa A.N.A.S., Florence 1969...... 90 Figure 4.21 Tenda Turca (Turkish Tent), the second half of the 17th century, made up of cotton, silk, goltone leather, Krakow, Castello Reale di Wawel ...... 94 Figure 4.22a, b The interior details of Accardi’s Tenda ...... 95 Figure 4.23 Carla Accardi, untitled drawing, 1970 ...... 97 Figure 4.24 Carla Accardi, untitled (models), 1968 ...... 97 Figure 4.25 Tenda, 1965-66...... 100 Figure 4.26 Carla Accardi in front of Tenda, Galleria Notizie, Turin, 1966...... 103 Figure 5.1 Photograph of Marta Lonzi in Turicchi, Florence, August 1977...... 108 Figure 5.2 Photograph of Ise Gropius at the terrace of Walter Gropius House, Lincoln, 1938 ...... 109 Figure 5.3 Competition project for the Municipal Theatre in Cagliari, M.G. Dall’Erba, M. Lonzi, R. Maestro, A. Nuzzo, 1965...... 111 Figure 5.4 Sketch of an interior view from the central core of the competition project for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, 1967. Group members: L. Quaroni, M. Lonzi, G. Esposito, A. Quistelli...... 112 Figure 5.5a, b Sketches of exterior views, Camera dei Deputati in Rome, Quaroni’s group, 1967...... 113 Figure 5.6 Photograph of Marta Lonzi and Carla Accardi’s design of the lamp entitled “A L 70,” 1970...... 117 Figure 5.7 A photograph of the apartment of Rosaria and Giorgio Mondino renovated by Marta Lonzi, 1989-1991, Turin. The lamp of Lonzi and Accardi is seen on the left...... 118 Figure 5.8 Former plan of the lower floor, Accardi’s studio, Rome, (color added by the author for emphasis)...... 119 Figure 5.9 Marta Lonzi’s sketch of the renovated plan of the lower floor, Accardi’s studio, Rome...... 119 Figure 5.10 Former plan of the terrace floor, Accardi’s house, Rome...... 120 Figure 5.11 Marta Lonzi’s sketch of the renovated plan of the terrace floor, Accardi’s house, Rome...... 120

xiv

Figure 5.12 Interior views of Carla Accardi’s house, Rome...... 121 Figure 5.13 Photograph of the room devoted to the artist’s studio, Carla Accardi’s house, Rome...... 122 Figure 5.14 Sketch of Marta Lonzi demonstrating the organization of volumes. ... 123 Figure 5.15 The site plan of another variant. Proposal of housing for Pietro Consagra...... 123 Figure 5.16 Photograph of the south elevation...... 124 Figure 5.17a, b The schematic models of continuous curves, Pietro Consagra, La Città Frontale, 1968...... 125 Figure 5.18a, b The façades of the factory in Sestu, Cagliari. 1973-74...... 130 Figure 5.19a, b Photographs of the interior of the factory, Sestu, Cagliari. 1973- 74...... 130 Figure 5.20 Photograph of a preliminary sketch of Marta Lonzi showing the site in its existing state...... 136 Figure 5.21 Photograph of Lonzi’s sketch showing the eight renovated facilities that she proposed...... 137 Figure 5.22a, b Marta Lonzi’s sketches of Forno del Pane...... 138 Figure 5.23 Sketch of the existing state of the apartment buildings adjacent to the factory...... 138 Figure 5.24 Sketch of the view towards the factory building depicting its relationship with the pre-existing buildings with their new facades...... 139 Figure 5.25 Photograph of the physical model showing an example of the renovated facades...... 139 Figure 5.26 Photograph of the sketch demonstrating renovated building of Pane, opened to the city and the park...... 140 Figure 5.27 Photograph taken from the terrace of the house...... 143 Figure 5.28 The exterior view of the attic house, 1930-1932...... 143 Figure 5.29 Photograph of the original plan of the attic floor...... 143 Figure 5.30 Marta Lonzi’s plan of the attic floor...... 144 Figure 5.31 Section drawing of Marta Lonzi’s renovation project, 1970-1972...... 144 Figure 5.32 An interior view of the project, 1970-1972...... 145

Figure 5.33 Film still from La Terrazza, directed by Ettore Scala, 1980...... 145 Figure 5.34 The view taken from the dining area demonstrating also the front door (in front) towards the kitchen (on the left side)...... 146 Figure 5.35 Film stills from Viola directed by Donatella Maiorca, 1998...... 146 Figure 5.36 The first sketches of the Chapel at Ronchamp...... 149 Figure 5.37 E.1027, the villa designed by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici...... 154 Figure 5.38a, b Exterior views of the Villa in Elba Island, Marta Lonzi, 1969-70...... 155 Figure 5.39a, b Interior views of the Villa in Elba Island, Marta Lonzi, 1969-70. . 155

xvi

CHAPTER 1

1. INTRODUCTION

“The critical act will consist of a recomposition of the fragments once they are historicized: in their remontage” 1

The years 1960s and 1970s are remarkable as they represented a paradigm-shift happening within a wider post-war period in terms of the emergence of intersecting political, social and cultural movements in Europe. Post-war Italy epitomizes this context of forceful opposition movements of students, workers and women against the dominancy of advanced capitalism. The Italian protest movements, as one of the long- lasting ones in Europe, had led to new alliances and spread into the society more profoundly than in other European countries which inherently changed the critique and praxis of architecture. This was the period of radical transformations of the society and the architecture it produced, represented and consumed.

Italian architecture, especially from 1968 on, has been described as the period of “continuous succession of crisis” growing out of “the search for a way out.”2 When the prominent architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri starts his analysis of the period between 1968 and 1975 with numeric data about the structure of profession, he points to the percentage of professionals to the graduates of architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan and that of the cubic meters to those actually constructed by architects in the

1 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), 15. 2 Vittorio Gregotti, New Directions in Italian Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 7.

cities. Between the years 1963 and 1969 “only 36 percent of school’s graduates were actually practicing the profession” while in 1969 architects were responsible for approximately somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the total cubic meter built in the country. Thus, he interprets this problematic data as the symbol of a “pathological” situation that Italian architecture had experienced.3

Moreover, in these years, the boundaries between architecture, planning, design and art have been blurred considerably along with new discussions held within each field. The intertwined positions of these disciplines could be followed both in the publications of the period varying from architectural journals to the books written by architects, art and architectural historians and, art critics; in the works of architects, namely their participation in the competitions of urban planning; their product designs and collaboration with artists. For instance, in the prominent architectural magazine Casabella, there were sections consistently devoted to art historians and critics like Germano Celant, who also came up with the term radical design and Giulio Carlo Argan whose book Storia dell’arte come la storia della città (History of art as the history of the city) deals with art, cities, architecture with their reciprocal relationship with each other and with the Italian culture.4 Similarly, Vittorio Gregotti’s book New Directions in Italian Architecture written in 1968 included a chapter on the role of industrial design.5

Architecture’s relation to planning and urbanization since the cities were the spatial manifestation of the problems due to the internal migration from the South to the North, and the emergence of periphery slums; unemployment, and real estate speculations as a consequence of the industrialization and modernization of the

3 Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 97. 4 Giulio Carlo Argan, Storia dell'arte come storia della città, ed. Bruno Contardi (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1983) 5 Gregotti, 96-105.

country, were displayed and awakened the architects’ as well as society’s interest in general.6 Accordingly, the vast accumulation of analysis of cities pursued by famous Italian architects is not a coincidence. To give some examples, in 1966 both Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti published their books respectively L’architettura della città (The Architecture of the City), and Il territorio dell’architettura (The Territory of Architecture).7 The urge to examine the changing dynamics of the production of cities and architecture, was not limited to the scholars or architects, but of interest to the students as well, particularly in relation to their critique of the traditional education system which they criticized for not touching upon social and political problems.

As for the altering relationship between industrial design and architecture, the landmark exhibition, entitled Italy: The New Domestic Landscape curated by Emilio Ambasz and held in 1972 at MoMA is exemplary of such intersections of these two fields for it unfolds, beyond being merely a collection of fascinating products, the evolving methodologies of communications, linguistics, politics.8 The latter contributed to the challenging or even more problematizing of the attributed function of design to serve as a medium of structuring everyday life. In a similar vein, it is not a coincidence that the architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ renowned phrase “from the spoon to the town”9 often re-appeared as the title of many exhibitions displaying the Italian Design of the post-war period which can be interpreted as another illustration of different scales of actions and productions intervening with each other, and architects’ standing at the junction expected to be capable of manifesting their ideas at

6 Ayşe Belgin Turan, “Production of a Discourse: Italian Neo-Rationalism as Case Study” (PhD diss., Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University, 1995), 122. 7 For an analysis of the written cities by Italian architects in the 1960s and 1970s, see Stefano Boeri, La città scritta: Carlo Aymonino, Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo Rossi, Bernardo Secchi, Giancarlo De Carlo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016). 8 This exhibition is also critical because it was the first time Italian design was represented at a large scale in the US receiving international recognition through press. It has also been considered the moment which officialized Italian radical design. See the exhibition catalog Italy: the new domestic landscape; achievements and problems of Italian design, ed., Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Florence: Centro Di, 1972) 9 “dal cucchiaio alla città”

each level, scale and medium. Umberto Eco elaborates on this point summarizing that in the 1950s “architects (and designers) were in a privileged position in Italy: they personified a Leonardesque dream, that is, they tried to give new life to a renaissance image of man interested in all aspects of life.”10

At the beginning of the 1970s, on the other hand, as epitomized in the MoMA exhibition of 1972, this conceptualization of modern architect’s ideal to influence society “in all aspects of his proposal” changed towards more critical approaches. Eco presents two main tendencies in these altering attitudes of designers in the early 1970s. While the first was concordant with market demands and “designers produced what industry asked for”; the second introduced “ironic and provocative programmes,” i.e., radical design.11 In this sense, each perspective merits its own comprehensive analysis of the debates which are beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, what is at the center here is, first, the awareness of the fact that although relatively much historical evidence is possessed regarding Italian architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, when it comes to gender studies in scope of architectural history of the post-war Italy, it still demands an extraordinary attempt to explore and find the place of women, their experiences and ideologies.

On the one hand, the studies on gender and architecture have gained momentum in architectural history and its historiography, especially in the 1990s.12 The architectural historian Mary McLeod puts forward the accomplishments of the feminist scholarship of that decade to bring into the fore “names of once-forgotten women,” to re-examine

10 Umberto Eco, “Phenomena of This Sort Must Also be Included in Any Panorama of Italian Design,” in Apocalypse Postponed: Umberto Eco, ed., Robert Lumley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 188. 11 Ibid., 189. 12 See, for instance, Beatriz Colomina, Jennifer Bloomer, ed., Sexuality & Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992); Diana Agrest et al., The Sex of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Debra Coleman et al., Architecture and Feminism: Yale Publications on architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); and, Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000).

“the reputations of architecture’s male heroes” and to expose “sexual inequity and discrimination in the profession.”13 On the other hand, such studies have been promoted in the Italian context only very recently. The Turin based project “MoMoWo: Women’s creativity since the Modern Movement” initiated in 2014 is exemplary of these recent attempts in Italy aiming at “revealing and promoting the contribution of women design professionals to European cultural heritage.”14

If we accept that "to be admitted is to be represented"15 as Beatriz Colomina argues, some reflections on the issue of women architects’ representation becomes necessary to justify my point of departure to focus on the production of women in this study. In other words, the thesis is inspired by feminist critiques of historiography in which many women architects have been neither canonized, nor historicized but remained as missing fragments waiting to be located properly.

1.1. Some Reflections on the Recognition and Self-Representation of Women Architects in the 1960s and 1970s

Although Italian women became more present in the architectural education and profession in accordance with the transformations in political, social and cultural spheres that Italy has undergone in the 1960s and 1970s, the recognition of their contribution remained limited to very few women architects. From a retrospective point of view, the problems with their visibility in historiography stem from the lack of representation of women’s contribution to the production system at their own time

13 Mary McLeod, “Perriand: Reflections of Feminism and Modern Architecture”, Harvard Design Magazine, 20, Spring/Summer, 2004, http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/20/perriand- reflections-on-feminism-and-modern-architecture. 14 Ana Maria Fernandez Garcia et al., ed., MoMoWo. 100 Works in 100 Years: European Women in Architecture and Design. 1918-2018 (Turin: Agit Mariogros, Beinasco, 2016), 6. For the activities and publications see also the project’s website: http://www.momowo.eu/ 15 Beatriz Colomina, “Introduction,” in Sexuality & Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

which intrinsically turns into a difficulty to find the related historical documents. Concerning the present time, the main challenge could be the limited number of archives devoted to women architects causing difficulties for contemporary desires to restate their visibility. On the other hand, even though Italian feminism was at its heyday in the 1970s, how much it was embraced by women architects does not have a straightforward answer as their self-narrations might demonstrate distinct attitudes in accepting or rejecting the oppression imposed on them by the patriarchal culture by means of predetermined gender roles.

In general, there was a tendency among women architects to work within male-female partnerships to deal with the problems of recognition as the respectable social subject of the society. Although it does not necessarily mean that their names were shadowed by male partners, it nevertheless causes problems to identify contributions of women. For instance, the architect Franca Helg, who worked together with Franco Albini for over twenty-five years, warned Cini Boeri over the possibility of a collaboration with Marco Zanuso by saying that: “what are you doing? You’ll end up always being in the shadow of someone. Get yourself away, decide, be brave.”16

On the other hand, some recognized women architects from the previous generation like Gae Aulenti and Cini Boeri had their own offices in contrast to the tendency to work in collaboration with male partners. Both architects were born in the 1920s and graduated from the Polytechnique of Milan at the beginning of the 1950s. They deliberately distanced themselves from the women’s movement and even rejected it as they equated their productivity in the profession and its recognition with emancipation. Despite the indifference towards feminist struggles and denial of oppression, their statements regarding the experience of professional practice reveal some commonly shared problems women encountered within both education and profession. Aulenti, for instance, argued that she and the other women of her generation did not live

16 As cited in Catharine Rossi, “Furniture, Feminism and the Feminine: Women Designers in Post-war Italy, 1945 to 1970” Journal of Design History 22, no.3 (2009): 248.

feminism directly but emancipation.17 Therefore, as a woman who did not need to work with a male partner to receive projects and to be recognized as an architect, she thought she already gained her emancipation. Although she was well aware of the gender related problems she had faced, she was against even stating its very existence:

There are plenty of other talented women architects, but most of them seem to link up with men. I've always worked for myself, and it's been quite an education. Women in architecture must not think of themselves as a minority, because the minute you do, you become paralyzed. It is most important to never create the problem.18

Boeri from a similar perspective encountered difficulties for being a woman starting from her education and recalls the humiliation she felt in Restauro (restoration) exam when Professor Annoni asked her how she could think of being an architect with curly hairs. She also remembers the advice of her teachers to design strong looking buildings to justify being an architect as a woman.19 Even though Boeri argues that she was designing regardless of being either a woman or man,20 thus addressing to the gender- neutrality of design for her, she could not ignore the types of works she was asked to realize and complained about the fact that she was never commissioned to design “a train or an airplane, unfortunately […] nor a bicycle.”21

Both Aulenti and Boeri along with other limited renowned women architects might be considered belonging to the elite of Italian society; therefore, they might have been less subjected to the conventional gender roles which facilitated their entrance to the university and running their own offices. Moreover, they had architect friends supporting them to pursue a career in architecture as in the case Ernesto Rogers and

17 Ibid. 251. 18 Carol Vogel, “The Aulenti Uproar,” New York Times Magazine, 22 Nov. 1987. 19 Catharine Rossi, “Existence, Experience and Representation: Women and Design in Post War Italy” (Master's Thesis, University of Brighton, 2006), 15. 20 Margherita Guccione, “Cini Boeri: Design is a Jot but also a Commitment.” Published 9 May 2012. [retrieved from: https://www.domusweb.it/en/interviews/2012/05/09/cini-boeri-designing-is-a-joy-but- also-acommitment.html] 21 Rossi, 2009, 246.

Anna Castelli-Ferrieri though there were also recommendations not to join the profession like Giuseppe De Finetti who told Boeri that it was “a career absolutely for men.”22 Nevertheless, their disinterested attitude towards feminism justified through achieving personal emancipations, cannot be attributed solely to their generation nor to similar familial backgrounds. Adopting such an expectation might anticipate strong changes in the stance of women architects in the successive periods considering the possible effects of the notion of autonomy embedded in the opposition movements. In other words, it would cause the risk of expecting an obliged feminist position from Italian women architects of the younger generations of the 1960s and 1970s which would not be necessarily the only way to stand against the canons of the patriarchal society in their professional experience.

The architect Nanda Vigo, for instance, provides an interesting example in this regard. She was born in Italy in 1936, went onto an internship in San Francisco and then attended the school of Frank Gehry in Arizona for a year after her graduation from architecture at Lausanne Polytechnic. As she was disappointed about her experience in the States, particularly during her internship at the Gehry’s school, she returned to Milan and opened her own studio in 1959.23 She was involved with the Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who gave Vigo an ultimatum in 1962 that if she would not give up her studio he would not marry her at the moment the two were in the town hall preparing the publication for their planned wedding. Vigo remembers her reaction in retrospect in these words: “That was simply too much for me! […] I had the desire to do everything differently and was enthusiastic about my work. And now Manzoni wanted me to stop. Appalling!”24 Therefore, they did not get officially married and after a short period Manzoni died which again the architect’s own words described as “[i]n retrospect I am glad he died. I was sometimes so angry because he was so much against

22 Rossi, 2006, 19. 23 Nanda Vigo, “With my ideas I was always a bit too early; that was my problem” in Strong women for art: in conversation with Anna Lenz, ed. Anna Lenz (Munich: Hirmer, 2013), 206. 24 Ibid., 211.

my work that I might have killed him.”25 Although Nanda Vigo was not part of a feminist group, nor she stated any interest towards it, her rejection of patriarchal values as can be inferred from her relationship with Manzoni demonstrates that the gender roles embedded in culture did not conform to her ideals in any way. Accordingly, one must be aware of the imposition of long-rooted traditions on women architects while also having an awareness of the possibilities of refusal of patriarchy by women, which did not have to be specifically referring to a feminist discourse but could be achieved in different ways.

As for the presence of women architects and designers in Italian groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s labeled mostly as representatives of Italian Radical Architecture, the dominancy of male members and somehow the continuation of stereotypical gender roles are again obvious. There were no women in Superstudio (1966), The Florentine 9999 (1967), Zziggurat (1968), and Turin Strum (1971).26 Among the few women who were part of such “Radical” groups, Patrizia Cammeo, a member of Florence based UFO group founded in 1967, explains her contribution as “the nice girl who was the model in the photo shootings and despite the fact that we were revolutionary, the women touched only the most “domestic” topics.”27

Departing from such reflections on the experience of Italian women architects, the thesis focuses on two feminist women, the artist Carla Accardi and the architect Marta Lonzi, both active members of the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile and aimed at challenging the authority with a desire for change. Therefore, this study aims to unfold the impacts of the feminist discourse of Rivolta, particularly their key notions as autocoscienza (self-consciousness), separatism, and authenticity on the productions of these two women. Carla Accardi was already a recognized painter in the artistic milieu

25 Ibid., 212. 26 Elena Dellapiana and Pesando, Annalisa B. “In front of and behind the Mirror: Women in Italian Radical Design” in Proceedings of the 3rd MoMoWo International Conference, Workshop (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018), 93-94. 27 Ibid., 94.

of Italy between 1965 and 1972 when she produced her habitable environments encapsulating feminist connotations inspired by Rivolta Femminile and challenging the prescribed notions of domesticity, which are re-read in this thesis in the light of the renewed attention of scholars of art history particularly in the last decade. Marta Lonzi, on the other hand, despite her productivity in architectural theory and practice, is exemplary of the lack of recognition women architects suffer from. For the last couple of years, the project of Marta Lonzi Archive has been underway in the Elvira Badaracco Foundation in Milan.

Figure 1.1a, b, c Elvira Badaracco Foundation and Marta Lonzi Archive, Milan.

Source: Photographed by the author.

The archive project is led by the architect Raffaella Poletti who also wrote the only article written in English on Lonzi presented as part of MoMoWo Symposium in 2018.28 However, even Poletti had heard of Marta Lonzi’s name for the first time when she was contacted by her husband after Lonzi’s death in 2008 asking for the preparation of a book about the architect. Although such a book was never realized it

28 Raffaella Poletti, “The Marta Lonzi Archive: Subjectivity in the Creative Process” in Women's Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018) Toward a New Perception and Reception Helena Seražin et al., eds. (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018), 1110-1118.

fortunately turned into a project of the architect’s archive29 which constitutes an important site of knowledge for this thesis which I visited during my research process when it was still in progress. In other words, it provided the possibility to complement the architect’s theoretical conceptualizations with her architectural works since they are not given place even in Lonzi’s own books.

While pursuing an analysis of the feminist positions of the cases, this study also aims at relating them to the Italian context in order to comprehend their original contributions to the art and architectural discourse and practice of the period. Therefore, it is crucial to set the scene via a comprehensive depiction of the Italian landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly in the following two chapters, first I will present the general Italian landscape, that is, the social and political transformation the Italian society experienced in that period. Hence, Chapter 2 provides an examination of the transformations from an agriculture-based country into an industrialized one, and then focuses on their reflections on the society in the form of cycles of protest which started in the universities and fused into factories and the whole society. Subsequently, the attention is turned into Italian feminisms of the period as part of the general social contestation and the feminist manifestoes will be the focus to portray a general framework.

Having set the general Italian scenery in Chapter 2, in Chapter 3 I focus on two particular women organizations, the Association of Italian Women Architects and Engineers (AIDIA) and Rivolta Femminile respectively. It should be noted that since in this study Marta Lonzi is not presented as the representative of Italian women architects’ experience nor as the ideal feminist contribution to architecture, a portrayal of the activities and expressions of AIDIA was necessary to enrich the comprehension of the context in which the selected cases operated. While exposing the discrimination women architects faced in the profession, AIDIA also provides another form of reaction against it aiming at remediation through practical solutions. The second part

29 Personal interview with Poletti, collected on January 16th 2019, Milan.

of the chapter focuses on the influential feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, founded in 1970, and introduces the critical concepts the group developed during the first half of the 1970s to provide the feminist background to which the case studies are related as they both contributed to its formation in 1970 as active members and demonstrated reflections of its discourse on their careers.

Chapter 4 and 5 are devoted to the case studies Carla Accardi and Marta Lonzi respectively. The former investigates the alternative domesticity inherent in Accardi’s habitable art installations, namely the tents and the orange suit, and provides an analysis from three different perspectives. Firstly, it posits her spaces within the general habitable art phenomenon of the period; secondly, the nomadic references of the works are analyzed; and, lastly the possibility of artist’s creation of feminist landscapes is elaborated. Chapter 5, on the other hand, reveals the impacts of feminism on Marta Lonzi’s conceptualization of architecture, in particular her constant research on architect’ creative processes. Hence, dealing mostly with Lonzi’s textual production including a vast range of personal memories which are almost like autobiographies, the chapter aims at demonstrating how the feminist ideals adopted by the architect are manifested in her critique of canonical architectures of the period and her critique of the modern architects as exalted subjects. Finally, the last chapter presents the concluding remarks about the extent these two women reflected their feminist ideals along with the ways they adopted to overcome the constraints of the patriarchal society in their productions. Thus, this study is a demonstration of the different reflections of a particular feminist collective on the design process and production of space in accordance with the political and social climate of Italy during that period.

CHAPTER 2

2. SETTING THE GENERAL ITALIAN LANDSCAPE IN THE 1960s AND 1970s

2.1. The Political and Social Transformation

It might seem that Italy, after WWII had undergone the same processes as in other industrialized countries such as rapid urbanization, economic growth, and its integration to the international sectors. However, when thinking about the problems it faced, it should be noted that Italy was a country that lost the war and at the beginning of the 1950s was considered as a peasant landscape mainly based on agriculture, thus far from being a developed country. By the end of the decade, the country as many others throughout the world experienced a so-called Economic Miracle and rapidly became one of the protagonists of the Western market.

To set the ground for the “politics of development” and the comprehension of the consequent social transformations, Donald Sassoon puts forward a division. He describes the period between 1950 and 1957 as the “preparation for economic expansion” while the period between 1958 and 1963, also known as the economic miracle, were the years of “fast economic growth.”30 The second phase, as widely accepted, was marked by export-led policies, in other words, Italy’s entrance into the competitive international market. However, the so-called miracle did not go hand in hand either with the income level or the living standards of the working class but instead relied on the increase in productivity and diffusion of the mass consumer goods

30 See Donald Sassoon, Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society, and Politics since 1945 (2nd ed). (New York: Longman, 1997), 26-41.

into more prosperous countries. The profitability was facilitated through cheap labor force maintained mainly by high level of unemployment, the internal migration from the south to the northern industrial cities, and the weakness of the trade unions.31

In terms of its politics, it has been dominated by the constant competition between three parties: the Christian Democratic Party (DC) which was in power between 1946 and the 1990s, the Communist Party (PCI), for its continuous oppositions to the former yet unable to take over control, and the Socialist Party (PSI) of which coalition with the DC made impacts on the expectations of society from the government. On the other hand, this by no means implies the presence of strong stability in politics or economics. In fact, the country experienced considerable transformations at many levels without being led by the unity of purpose. Within this context, the 1950s can be considered as the years when the Christian Democrats developed their state system by also relying on church hierarchy and private capital32 while “the left, in disarray,” had been marginalized and excluded from the political spectrum in power.33

The fact that Democrats attached importance to conserving and reenacting the Catholic values in a society which was also enjoying the conditions of modernity created tension at an ideological level. Thus, the changes in a relatively industrialized society under such American influences as individual liberty, technological developments, and consumerism, which in practice were also espoused by most of the party members, led the DC to emphasize “the need for society to correspond to and reflect Catholic values” in their propaganda.34 In addition, Democrats’ economic policies in which the state

31 Donald Sassoon justifies his categorization as such through statistical data on Italy’s export rate. For instance, while “in 1958 the value of Italian exports was 4.7 percent of the total value of all exports of the top fourteen industrialized countries (same as in 1940) [in] 1963 this had reached 7.3 per cent.” Sassoon, 31. 32 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988 (London: Pinguin Books, 1990), 156. 33 Sassoon, 26. 34 Ginsborg, 154.

interventions were not directed towards improving public services but to ensure private investments in sectors like housing and transportation, resulted in another conflictual situation. In other words, the state itself played a major role in the economic miracle but not as an actor guiding the growth for the sake of public interests but as an element playing a significant role in the growth of the private enterprise through liberal policies.35

Nevertheless, the 1950s in Italy have been represented by a seemingly social peace between the working class and the prevalent economic groups, due to the transformations towards a welfare state along with the optimism of the economic growth. Towards the 1960s, it turned out that the beneficiaries were mainly big private companies and limited sections of the middle class which eventually paved the way for mass mobilizations of the working class and general social unrest. Accordingly, since 1960, there have been national strikes and demonstrations demanding wage increases and better working conditions since the government avoided establishing an income policy but pursued the authoritarianism in the management of the factories.

Such crisis forced the government to modernize the system of production and to reconstitute itself politically so as to create a new consensus to rely on.36 The new consensus was tried to be achieved by Christian Democrats in forming new alliances with the left, that is, in this case with the Socialist Party (PSI). By this way, the first Center-Left government coalition was established in 196337 supposedly aiming at making “capitalist development rational and beneficial to the working class as a whole.”38 However, the entrance into the government caused a notable split within the Socialists weakening their already limited power. Therefore, despite the reformist policies PSI provisioned to carry out from within the system and the consequent

35 Sasoon, 35. 36 Ibid., 26 37 Ibid., 43. 38 Ibid., 15

expectations of both right and left wings of the society, the coalition was not able neither to recover the broken link between the productivity and wages, nor to solve the problems of internal migration, unemployment, and real estate speculations. In the meantime, through deflationary measures in economy, unemployment increased; several small firms either got shut down or swallowed by the bigger ones, leading to a considerable decrease in the power of worker’s bargaining for their demands.39 Accordingly, the severe problems of unemployment; low wages; poor living conditions coupled with the institutional left parties' and trade unions' incapacity to represent the working class caused a dramatic discontent in the society, which was followed by a new wave of social movements, a cycle of protests in the late 1960s.

2.2. The Protest Cycle

Thus far, I have briefly presented the conditions leading to Italians’ distrust towards the government due to the expectations raised by prospective reforms which remained unfulfilled. Within this context, the Italian students are one of the earliest protesters whose contestation of the system could be regarded as the archetypical movement of opposition in that period. It started at the university campuses spread into factories and more generally into society as the other social actors took part in the scene. The years 1960s and 1970s represented a paradigm shift in a broader European context, which challenged the authorities as well as societies at manifold levels within their intense political climates though with peculiarities of each country.

Sidney Tarrow reminds us that even though when thinking about Europe in the late 1960s, the particular place and time to come to one’s mind would probably be France in May 1968, “[t]he Italian cycle began earlier, lasted longer, and affected society and

39 Ginsborg, 275.

politics, more profoundly than did the French one.”40 In a similar vein, on its impacts on society and politics Umberto Eco wrote that:

Even though all visible traces of 1968 are gone, it profoundly changed the way all of us, at least in Europe, behave and relate to one another. Relations between bosses and workers, students and teachers, even children and parents have opened up. They’ll never be the same again.41

2.2.1. The Students’ Movement and the Faculties of Architecture

It is well known that the students’ mobilization had reached its peak moment in 1968; however, there were already some alterations in students’ attitudes and actions concerning the social and political repercussions of workers’ uprisings. Students attended workers’ strikes of the early 1960s as can be seen from the happenings of 1963 when all Italian architecture faculties were occupied.42 Scholars who narrate Italian students’ movement often remark about the material bases for its emergence at the beginning of the decade. These are the educational reforms of the Center-Left coalition aiming at, in the simplest terms, finding a compromise between the increasing number of university students and structural shortages embedded in the malfunctioning system of education. In this regard, one crucial educational reform is the compulsory secondary education in 1962 playing a significant role in the increase in the enrolled university students rather than modernizing the system.43 Besides, science faculties were opened to students from the technical institutes, and the university entrance examination was abolished in 1965.44 Hence the intake of

40 Sidney Tarrow. Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 6. 41 As cited in Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to1978 (London: Verso,1990), 2. 42 Lumley, 69. 43 Ginsborg, 298. 44 Ibid., 299.

university students expanded considerably. Between the years 1960 and 1968, the number rose from 268,000 to 450,000.45

Another crucial reform which culminated the discussions in the academy, not only the students’ voices but that of professors and assistants, along with politicians and publicists is the Gui Bill, proposed in 1965 by the DC’s Minister of Public Instruction, Luigi Gui. The most controversial aspects of this series of reforms are its restriction of the size of the student body and the introduction of different types of courses “from one-year diplomas to the full-degree” ones.46 The students considered the planned reforms as the Center-Left government’s betrayal to the ideals promoted by itself.47 However, they were not alone in the opposition because of the support of the teaching body, the Communist Party, and the trade unions. Through the strong resistance at a national level manifested itself the most in the students’ occupation of faculties, the bill could not become a law.48

In this respect, Robert Lumley puts a particular emphasis on the architecture faculties as “lively centers of student politics.” By turning his attention to the Polytechnic in Milan in particular, he describes students’ interests and demands as such:

[there] study groups analyzed the political functions of architecture and criticized courses and learning methods. In particular, students demanded the coordination of subjects into coherent programmes of study, the integration of research and teaching, and the introduction of collective study. The emphasis was on education as process rather than product. Radical students connected the role of the institution to national politics. Thus, the Centre-Left was increasingly criticized for its failures to introduce urban planning and to improve working- class housing, and the Gui bill was criticized for the way it threatened to separate research from teaching and ‘technicize’ the study of architecture.49

45 Ibid. 46 Lumley, 69. See also Tarrow, 155-157. 47 Lumley, 66. 48 Ibid., 105. 49 Ibid., 69.

His depiction of the atmosphere of the occupation of the architecture faculty in 1967 which lasted for fifty-five days is exemplary of the success of Italian students’ movement is revealing “the vulnerability of the system to disruption.”50 It is the collectivity, elimination of hierarchy, and dynamism of the political debates which, according to Lumley encapsulated the essence of the forthcoming actions:

An environment was created which was ‘functional to collective living, debate and shared work’; all major decisions were taken by the general meetings rather than by UNURI [National Union of Italian University Students]; commissions were set up to examine political and educational issues with the participation of some lecturers.51

The faculty occupations were often accompanied by printed expressions of resistance, for instance, in the forms of newsletters and posters. Through all means, the architecture students aimed at “the conquest of structural space within which to work at the creation of a new pedagogy.”52 At this point, it is interesting to notice that the prominent Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti included a chapter devoted to the students’ revolt in the architecture faculties in his book New Directions in Italian Architecture which he wrote in 1968, the summit moment of students' mobilization. Considering his broad analysis of discussions in faculties, this might indicate that the revolts were historicized or analyzed as a phenomenon even before their strength faded away. However, his attempt is more of an immediate reflection on the present events rather than an evaluation in retrospect. He states that there occurred different areas of interest to focus on in discussions of architecture and planning such as “the relationship between typology and urban morphology,” “monumentality of architecture” besides tendencies “formalizing the project procedures.”53 Nevertheless, the substance might be encapsulated in the newly asked questions about architects, architecture, and society which Gregotti elaborates as such:

50 Tarrow, 144. 51 Lumley, 69. 52 Tarrow 152. 53 Gregotti, 108.

It would seem that the questions, “Who is the architect?” and “What is his place in society?” […] has been replaced by the question, “What is architecture, what does it consist of, what are its problems, and what are its social proposals and challenges?54

Thus, unlike the previous periods when debates on architecture and urban planning were dealt with mostly through magazines and pressure groups, in the late 1960s, the schools of architecture became the central arena to do so.

On the other hand, the students’ oppositions have not always been appreciated for their profound impacts but sometimes the consequences have been regarded as superficial since the alternative proposals of curriculum and teaching methods mostly remained unrealized. In this regard, we can recall Manfredo Tafuri’s suspicious approach towards the student’s movement when he states that students’ rebellious actions of 1968, “insofar as the architecture schools and cultural institutions were concerned, only resulted in superficial modifications, hasty reflections, and demagogic attitudes resolved in débâcles. The protests […] only revealed the fragility of those institutions and their function.”55

The movement experienced a turning-point in February 1968 which was to be known as the “Battle of Valle Giulio,” when the faculty of architecture at the University of Rome was occupied by the students, which was followed by their eviction by the police. There occurred a clash between students and the police causing “forty-six policemen ended up in hospitals and an unknown number of students’ getting injured” which has been interpreted as the transition from a relatively passive position into a more active struggle, even a violent one.56 The changes in the image of the students’ identity awakened counter positions for some intellectuals. Accordingly, some accused students of pursuing a bourgeois rebellion as exemplified by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s renown poem written as a response to aforementioned struggle in which he posits the actions and demands of students as analogues to the ones of spoilt children.

54 Ibid., 106-108. 55 Tafuri, 1989, 98. 56 Ginsborg, 304.

It's sad. The polemics against the PCI should have been done in the first half of the last decade. You're late, kids . . . Now the journalists of all the world (including those of the television) are licking (as I believe one still says in university) your arses. Not me, my friends. You have the faces of spoilt rich brats . . . You are cowardly, uncertain and desperate . . . When, yesterday, at Valle Giulia you fought the policemen I can tell you I was on their side! Because the police are the sons of the poor…57

Since the second half of 1968, the spontaneous nature of students’ movement started to turn into an organizational one outside the boundaries of the traditional left. In this regard, arguably the most significant influence of students’ movement for the future social upheavals was their emphasis on autonomy. As the new social subjects, through their varying forms of action, and the so-called rhetoric they challenged the Center- Left coalition, the traditional left, and institutions, in other words, they forced authorities at many levels. In doing so, they not only influenced the frames of other social movements to take place but provided “even to Communists […] both a challenge to adopt more advanced positions and, eventually, a new generation of activists.”58

2.2.2. From Faculties into Factories: Workers’ Movement and the Alliance with Students

As the young generation who participated in students’ oppositions graduated together with the concept of student-worker promoted between 1967 and 1968,59 the factories became the focal area for new forms of struggle. With the peak moment of the class struggle, namely the Hot Autumn of 1969, Italian workers’ movement has taken its

57 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “II PCI ai giovani!!” LEspresso, vol. XIV no. 4, (June 16, 1968), pp. 12-13, as cited in Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera” October, vol. 124, Postwar Italian Art (Spring, 2008), 19. 58 Tarrow, 165. 59 “Defining students as workers had two strategic functions: first, opposing the traditional left-wing opinion that they are nothin but petit bourgeois dilettantes; and second, affirming thatthey were an autonomous in their own right, using a rationale that would be acceptable within the subculture of the Left.” Ibid., 149.

place in recorded history as the third-largest strike movement.60 As Robert Lumley puts forward, “the workers not only withdrew their labor on a massive scale, but challenged the organization of work and the system of authority within the factory.”61

Within this context, the student movement’s role in changing the expectations of society through a succession of protests are notable for they have set the stage for future contestations. Their contributions to the worker’s mobilization, especially since late 1968 as the movement seemed to have lost its momentum, took shape in several ways. It started with their participation in the already existent strikes yet reinforced the solidarity even between unions and industrial workers thanks to established social networks during the prior protests. Moreover, for their experience and presence in those protests, students strengthened workers’ hand against police intervention. Some students also aimed at using their professional abilities in support of the working class as in the case of mostly medical students.62

These developments, besides the criticism of intellectuals towards the western capitalist system, conjured up New Left in Italy, as in many other geographies. Paul Ginsborg, while arguing that the presence of the Italian new left was the largest in Europe by the numbers of militants it managed to mobilize, points out four essential problems. The first is its highly divided characteristic resulting in lack of any united action between factions; the second is their articulation of a hierarchy constituted of “almost entirely males”; third is their “casual attitude towards violence”; and, the last one is their overrated belief in the possibility of realizing the socialist revolution within a short period of time without an in-depth analysis of the Italian context.63

60 Lumley, 144. 61 Ibid. 62 Tarrow, 178-181. 63 Ginsborg, 313.

However, even though the impacts of politicized students on the organization of workers’ mobilizations and those of the discourses of the New Left are indisputable, there were also other equally important actors and relationships taking the scene for the course of workers’ mobilizations. As Sidney Tarrow reminds us, the way skilled and unskilled labor force relate both to each other, and to the labor market is quite critical especially, between 1968 and 1969. While at first, it was the skilled and experienced workers and their demands which stimulated the conflicts, having proven the “vulnerability of the system,” their experience of militancy and unionization later turned into guidance, if not leadership, for the younger and unskilled ones including them in the scenes of protests.64

Moreover, the expectations of companies regarding the type of workers also changed. In the first half of the 1960s, the preference was for semi-skilled labor force over the experienced ones concerning the continuation of the increase in profitability through high level of production with low wages. In the second half of the decade, the labor market favored those workers with enough qualities “to sustain the heavier workloads and speed-up of production.”65 However, with younger generation’s increasing interest in pursuing studies at the university level even more complicated the situation. Thus, workers towards the 1970s regained their position to negotiate with authorities.

The workers’ demands also altered through time yet remained unanswered by the government. At the beginning, the worker’s demands demonstrated some resemblance with the previous strikes for their shared emphasis on better working conditions and higher payment.66 Towards the Hot Autumn of 1969, however, there occurred some hostile attitudes towards unionism with the claims of movement’s own autonomy and specifically because of unions’ inability to represent the unskilled and semi-skilled

64 Tarrow, 177-178. 65 Lumley, 149. 66 Ibid., 156.

workers. This situation in Lumley’s words caused a “structural crisis of representation” which forced unions go for democratization of the strikes so that they would reclaim their legitimacy.67 But most importantly, the changes of demands at the turn of the 1970s were rendered in the movement’s reaching beyond the factories into society which symbolized a general cultural shift representing resistance against institutions and establishments. In other words, with this extension, the worker’s movement was no longer the representative of society’s discontent since the road was opened for other forms of oppositions. In the 1970s, several social groups, largely ignored social and political subjects developed their activities of struggles. Among those are the women whose ideas and works this thesis analyzes, and who belonged to a particular feminist collective founded as part of such contestations. In the next chapter I will move on to Italian feminism where the general perspective adopted will be to present different forms of feminisms alongside the particular case of Rivolta Femminile.

2.3. Italian Feminisms

The literature on Italian feminism tends to introduce the subject and the history of its formation from the late 1960s onwards, therefore correlates it mainly with the term second-wave feminism developed during the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and especially in the United States. This tendency seems only natural considering the advent of women's movement and consequently, the formation of several organized feminist groups appeared in the same decade in Italy. As Luisa Passerini indicates, “the 1970s are historically central for the theoretical and historical definition of gender relations in the Italian case.”68 In scholarly works on Italian cultural studies of the period, the women's movement and Italian feminisms have been narrated as part of a cultural upheaval of the newly emerging subjects in a reciprocal relationship with the

67 Ibid., 216. 68 Luisa Passerini, "Gender Relations," in Italian Cultural Studies an Introduction, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 144.

anterior opposition movements, notably the students' revolt of 1968. The prevalent discussions within French, British and American feminisms of the 1960s are also evoked as influential in constituting a theoretical ground for Italian feminism.69 Therefore, its origins have been posited within the developments in the period after the so-called Economic Miracle of the 1950s.

There is no doubt that all these have provided the inspirations and conditions that paved the way for the formation of organized feminist movements of various kinds in the late 1960s which itself as a period marked a breaking point in the feminist discourse by resetting the agenda for debates around gender roles and politics of sexuality. Donald Sassoon, for instance, indicates that the acceptance of women as social subjects today is thanks to the developments that happened in the 1970s.70 He also states that, in Italy, the first wave feminism starting in the late 18th and becoming a reality in the late 19th century could not show “the presence or the strength of that in Anglo-Saxon countries.”71 From a comparative perspective on the developments taken place in those countries, there is no point to stand against this assessment, and it might even seem anachronistic to look for predecessors from the late 19th or early 20th century Italy. However, it might be useful to briefly mention its presence because such topics as women’s suffragette, legal equality and divorce had already been on the agenda of earlier feminists.

The question why feminism became a mass movement in the 1970s and seen as almost absent in the period prior to the Second World War might be answered, from a broader perspective, through an analysis of the country's transitional period from a peasant

69 For a comprehensive study on the feminist movement in Italy from 1960 until the late 1980s, see Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), Yasmine Ergas. “1968-79. Feminism and the Italian Party System: Women's Politics in a Decade of Turmoil” Comparative Politics 14, no. 3 (Apr., 1982), 264.For Italian women's experience in the twentieth century see also Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth-century Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Penelope Morris, Women in Italy, 1945-1960 an Interdisciplinary Study (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 70 Sassoon, 107. 71 Ibid.

landscape to one of the protagonists of the industrial Western market and the subsequent shifts in the reactions of the society towards this process. However, the very same question also requires further insights into the presence of the prior forms of feminism in Italy and a recognition of the impacts of those previous contributions rather than neglecting them. Therefore, before going into particulars about the developments of the 1960s and 1970s, I would like to present briefly the activities of some earlier feminist activities in Italy to enrich the understanding of both continuities and shifts in the feminist debates over time to challenge the idea that feminism had not shown 'any' presence in the antecedent periods.

2.3.1. The 'Presence' of the First Wave Italian Feminism

At the turn of the 20th century a change in women's position in society, although uneven and limited mainly to the upper-class women, had already started to unveil. From a practical point of view, this contestation can be attributed to such altering structural preconditions as increasing education for girls and the number of women making their way to the public sphere of professional life, however few in numbers.72 On the other hand, even in the 19th century, some women challenged the entrenched practices of gender roles within the domain of family, which were also reinforced by the church and state to stabilize the society.73

Far from being a monopolized movement, feminism at the beginning of the 20th century Italy has been studied under such categories as the Radical, Liberal, Socialist or Catholic feminisms. Inherently, some central debate matters mostly addressing the family such as the issue of divorce brought about different reactions from different

72 Willson, 4. 73 Sharon Wood, Joseph Farrell. "Other voices: contesting the status quo", in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, eds. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 141.

parties. However, there was also a consensus on improving the accessibility of education, re-arrangements of maternity leave, and working conditions.74 Without making any categorization, I would like to point out two fundamental factors playing an important role in the formation of diverse forms of feminist contestations at that period: the effects of foreign feminist thinkers on Italian women intellectuals; and, new discussions stemming from the Italian landscape during and after the unification period.

Beginning with the inspirations coming from abroad, the flow of feminist ideas through foreign women living in Italy; appearance of the news of women's movement abroad in the Italian press and the other way around; Italian upper-class women traveling across Europe, thus their encounter with European feminists were crucial for Italian women to subvert the legitimacy of the status quo. In this regard, the Russian doctor Anna Kuliscioff, also known as the doctor of the poor, is worthy of attention. 75 Kuliscioff's stance is critical in its defiance of the structure of the family and the women's traditional role within it, coin contradistinction to the mainstream expressions of many feminists at the same period.76 Another interesting point to mention is that Kuliscioff, together with her first husband Andrea Costa and her close friend Filippo Turati founded the Italian Socialist Party, PSI in 1892. As one of the founders of the Socialist Party, she consistently promoted suffragette. However, it was considered as “politically too dangerous” by most of the members, thus did not become a subject matter to evaluate its possibility.77

74 Wood and Farrell, 143. 75 P. Mocchi states that the title 'the doctor of the poor people' was deemed appropriate due to Kuliscioff's "work in the poorest districts of Milan, where she treated women who were victims of domestic violence, poverty, and disease." As cited in Miguel Malagreca, “Lottiamo Ancora: Reviewing One Hundred and Fifty Years of Italian Feminism.” Journal of International Women's Studies 7, no.4 (2006), 72. 76 Malagreca, 72. 77 Wood and Farrell, 144-145.

As for the influences deriving from the social, political, economic and juridical context of the country itself, the egalitarian and humanist ideals of the Risorgimento patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini are noteworthy.78 In building a Republican state, thus a new identity and its culture, Mazzini supported some reforms of the morality of this future universal subject promoting “social and moral regeneration of all its citizens, including women” by situating the family unit at its core.79 However, for positioning the family as such, he has been criticized for restating the maternal duties of women and accordingly fostering the image of the mother to the nation.

Concerning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly a few names stand out as representative figures of the first wave Italian feminism like Princess Cristina Trivulzo Barbiano di Belgioioso who rendered her feminist ideals through charitable institutions she established in the 1840s with the intentions to increase “the standard of education for girls' and to fight against illiteracy in the recently unified peninsula.”80 Another crucial figure is Anna Maria Mozzoni, known as the promoter of women's right and suffrage, and German-born university assistant Paolina Schiff founded Lega Promotrice degli Interessi Femminili (League for the Promotion of Women's Interests) in Milan.81 The establishment of the League is considered by the historian Annarita Buttafuoco as an indicator of a national history which takes gender into account as an integral part of itself. 82 Mozzoni criticized the Italian Civil Code as it was another legal form re-affirming and reinforcing the inferior position of married women in the society which inevitably opened the way for the strong oppositions and criticisms

78 “Since the Renaissance, Italy was divided in city states that were continually threatened by occupation from neighboring powers. Risorgimento (revival) is a term that describes the nationalism and political unification of Italy that began after the French revolution of 1789 and consolidated in 1860/1870. In these eighty years, there were three wars of independence leading to unification and several diplomatic and military battles, the most important ones led by northerners Cavour, Garibaldi, and Mazzini.” Malagreca, 71. 79 Wood and Farrell, 142. 80 Malagreca, 70. 81 Willson, 24. 82 Ibid.

towards the family law at a larger scale for the future.83 In addition, she was one of the leading contributors to the journal La Donna (Woman), founded by Adelaide Beccari in 1869.84 This journal, offering a platform for women to voice their demands for emancipation, has particular importance due to being the very first women's magazine of the post-unification Italy.

The historian Perry Willson stresses that, unlike the 'new' or second-wave feminism of the 1970s which could be considered as “a youth movement or generational revolt”, the champions of the first wave Italian feminism were mostly middle-aged women devoted to “doing good” for society as a whole85 far from the dominant idea of the 1970s that the personal is political. In accordance with their ideal to better the whole society, some feminists at the beginning of the 20th century also drew attention to the conditions under which women worked and preoccupied with possible reforms to be made to improve the right of working-class women. However, since the majority belonged to the social elite living in the cities, they were ignorant of the realities of the lives of peasants or even that of the working-class.

The structure of family might be another mutual area of debate for Italian feminist discourses of the first and second half of the 20th century. However, the attitude of the first wave feminists towards the family issue differs considerably from that of the second-wave. Most of the turn-of-the-century feminist women desired to coin a 'new woman' for the modern world, which was to be achieved through reform of the family law. The reform in their mind, however, did not oppose to their role as wives and mothers; instead, they argued, by taking as primary, they would change themselves

83 Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, "Italian Women in the Making: Re-reading the Englishwoman’s Review (c.1871–1889)" in Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento, ed. Nick Carter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 187 84 Malagreca, 71. 85 Willson, 25.

into an educated and thus elevated social subjects.86 In short, their aim was not a search for or a conceptualization of a women-centered way of living.

During the World War II, many women entered the labor force though temporarily and in limited fields of action such as the Red Cross and war industries like military clothing. Nevertheless, it availed an image of working women in the public's mind.87 The fascist regime, for its attempt to create a new Italian nation, could not afford to risk the masculinity of the new, heroic man so as to maintain its legitimacy. Accordingly, neither women's nor homosexuals' voices were visible in the media but rather the propaganda made to envisage a new woman subject was naturally based on “maternity, reproduction, and the sanctity of the family space” which was practically supported by some strategies like the implementation of “a tax on unjustified celibacy.”88

Mussolini's fall and the Resistance period marked another vital point for women to be involved in politics. They voted for the first time in 1946 at the local scale; in 1948 nationwide which, on the other hand, led some accusations from left-wing that women, “politically naive [and] easily manipulated” prepared the Christian Democrats (DC) rise to power.89 During the 1950s, despite, and perhaps because of the Catholic values and importance of family in the traditional sense promoted by the DC and the church, women's ideals were very much alive becoming more visible.

86 Ibid., 24-25. 87 Ibid., 58-59. 88 Malagreca, 76. 89 Wood and Farrell, 145.

2.3.2. The Context of the 'New' Italian Feminisms of the 1970s

The feminisms of the 1970s, in Italy as elsewhere correlate to the term second-wave feminism in the literature, yet it will be addressed in this study as the new feminism in line with the emergence of New Left born out of students’ and intellectuals’ criticism of the traditional Left. In a similar vein, Italian women in that period also went beyond the traditional forms of contestation which had been mainly based on women’s emancipation and equality, but remarkably theorized varying thoughts and practices questioning women’s position in Italian society by challenging the patriarchal establishments. Through already established social networks within a shared opposition culture based on antiauthoritarianism, they had a confrontation with the actors of 1968, yet the relationships in between were not straightforward. Italian feminism was inspired by the autonomy of the students’ and workers’ movements, while it was also critical to the New Left for reinforcing women’s oppression by undermining it in the name of class-struggle. Moreover, even before the resistance, the effects of the youth cannot be ignored since they revealed a generation gap between their parents due to the changes in their lifestyle. This new life style the young adults adopted could be based on many factors some of which are the influence of foreign behaviors like that of Americans, the disruption of the traditional family with new cultural/sexual ethics and age-based solidarity.90

In the 1970s through legislation reforms, Italian women gained concrete legal achievements, though after long periods of struggles to attain those rights. The ones awakening much interest socially and politically could be the laws of divorce and abortion which passed in 1970 and 1975 respectively.91 However, even after the finalization of such laws disputes over them have not stopped. For instance, in 1972 there were reactions against the divorce law from many Catholics asking for a

90 Sassoon, 115. 91 Dellapiana, Pesando, 93.

referendum which was realized in 1974 in accordance with the DC’s concerns on preserving traditional values, yet was kept by the majority of votes.92 Along these lines, the issue of abortion caused similar reactions as it was offensive to the Catholic values, and consequently, there occurred a strong request for referendum on the law again. On the other hand, women managed to mobilize effectively and prevent it from happening, which also opened up new discussions on women’s role in society.93 It was such questions that the feminism of that period focused on and provided responses from different perspectives.

The feminisms of the 1970s Italy are quite diverse, vibrant, and passionate, which reflected on the theorization of distinct feminist stances with different scales to dwell on. The common characteristic of all, as Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp argue, is their “non-institutional basis” as they bridged the gap between theoretical and political aspirations through the characteristic nature of feminism’s theoretical refusal of master narratives and the political influences of particular canonical texts mainly French, British and American sources.94 Nevertheless, instead of portraying Italian feminism as a box filled up with different groups, I would rather focus on the feminist manifestoes written in the period as they have the potential to demonstrate different perspectives and notions such as autonomy and sexual difference in defining new relationships between different actors of the society. Although those notions are not necessarily inventions of the feminist discourse of the period, their meanings were substantially elaborated. Therefore, the feminist lexicon embraced in changing the pre- existing relationships and expressing new demands will be focused on as the instrument to draw a general framework of the context. Rather than focusing on each manifesto written in the 1970s, an exception could be the very first one in this context, the aim here is to reveal the substance of the textual productions of the period which were at the very center of feminist debates.

92 Ergas, 264. 93 Ginsborg, 369-370. 94 Bono and Kemp, 2

2.3.2.1. Feminist Manifestoes

Manifestoes, in general, are effective forms of social and political contestations for they have the potential to support struggles against any established idea within the dominant system. As Teresa Elbert puts forward:

[T]he manifesto is the genre of change-writing, of transformative textuality and the textuality of transformation. […] The manifesto, in other words, is the space in which concrete social contestations are articulated as abstract ideas. It puts in question the existing economic and social arrangements and intervenes in the alienated forms of knowledges and practices that have, by the agency of power, become familiar and commonsensical and thus have assumed the shape of natural modes of knowing and acting in the world.95

Thus, the manifesto has been used as an instrument for Italian feminists for exchange of ideas. This is not to claim that feminist manifestoes remained as isolated formulaic acts; instead they were textual embodiments of feminists’ theoretical premises to resolve the conflicts in society.

The first manifesto, possibly also the first written document of new feminisms of Italy was written in 1966 by the group called Demau standing for demystification of patriarchal authority.96 They denounced in the manifesto entitled “Manifesto programmatico del gruppo demau” (Manifesto of the Demau Group’s Program) that the group was not bounded to any political and religious tendency.97 Their aim was the search for renewal of human values which were to be realized through essential programmatic values determined in the document, namely “the opposition to the concept of integration of women into modern society”; “the search for new values concerning the whole system of relationships”; and, “the search for a new autonomy for women.”98

95 Teresa L. Ebert. “Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic” JAC 23, no. 3 (2003), 553-54. 96 Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Sexual difference. A theory of social-symbolic practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 35. 97 Demau, “Manifesto,” English translation in Bono and Kemp, 34. 98 Ibid.

The group’s stance is impressive in the sense that they evoked the questions on women’s autonomy and identity and the analysis of gender roles from a criticism of patriarchal authoritarianism even before the 1970s. For instance, they rejected the promotion of integration for it would reinforce women’s position as caretakers rather than dissolving the predetermined gender roles caused by the division of labor and transforming the society and its male dominated values. In doing so, as early as 1966, they provided an analysis of gender roles as something constructed by the culture and its instruments which surpassed “the traditional left-wing analysis of the division of labor in the family as the origin.”99

Some feminist manifestoes, especially those written by the younger generation with the political experience of mobilization, clearly demonstrate the influences of the protests of 1968. One example of this sort is the manifesto of the group called Cerchio spezzato (The Broken Cirle) formed by the Trento University students. Their manifesto “There Is No Revolution without Women’s Liberation, There Is No Liberation without Revolution” was published and handed out in 1970.100 Yet in terms of the theorization of a feminist struggle, arguably the most influential texts came from the prominent group Rivolta Femminile, which was formed not by the young students’ revolt but by intellectual women in their late thirties and early forties.

They published two notable manifestos in 1970 and 1977 respectively, among which particularly the first one will be analyzed in the successive chapter. The collective emphasized the need to redefine women’s identity, sexual difference, and autonomy. They rejected the predetermined conceptions of gender roles imposed by male culture since “[t]he female image with which man has interpreted woman is his own invention.”101 In the second manifesto, however, the group addressed also the women

99 Maud Anne Bracke. Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968-1983 (New York: Routledge, 2014a), 43. 100 Ibid., 12-13. 101 Rivolta Femminile. “Manifesto,” English translation in Bono and Kemp, 37.

who dismissed the significance of the self-discovery of women’s identity while being engaged in mass politics with the claim of being women’s representative delegators. Such criticism became explicit when Rivolta Femminile indicated regarding those women that:

You were given an identity by men and cannot give it up [therefore] the more you are concerned with women, the more alien you are to me [since] you don’t know who I am and you make yourself my mediator [but] who said you helped my cause? I helped your career.102

Figure 2.1 The First Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile distributed in Rome, 1970.

Source: [database online]. http://www.herstory.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/437.jpg [Accessed: 02.04.2019].

102 Rivolta Femminile. “I say I”, ibid., 59-60.

Rivolta is also influential in the sense that it provided one of the earliest feminist critiques of Marxism for it has been theorized within the framework of patriarchy. In a similar vein as Rivolta’s declaration that “Marxism has sold us [women] to hypothetical revolution”103 the nascent feminist groups of the 1970s centered around Marxist concepts which can be traced also through their manifestoes.

The women members of Movimento studentesco romano (Roman student movement) distributed a manifesto in 1969 entitled “Proposal for a Platform of Women’s Collectives.” The feminist students stressed the transformation of the class-struggle into one which would give central importance to the position of women in both private and public spheres, namely the family and labor market. Therefore, the manifesto rejected the conceptualization of “socialization of housework” as the new place given to women in the labor market, instead emphasized the importance of the analysis of women’s subordination.104 One other crucial group in advocating the need for reevaluation of Marxism came from Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) formed in 1972 in Padua.105 Most of its prominent members like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati were coming from workerist ideology. The theory and militancy of workerism were stimulated by a need to re-examine Marxist thought through an analysis of communism’s original sources. In other words, they established a Marxist discourse not from the perspective of capitalism but from that of the working-class itself with an idea of reversing the capitalism's cycle for the sake of achieving political autonomy of the workers. Mario Tronti, a prominent intellectual contributing to this theory, explains the essence as such:

The working-class struggle has forced the capitalist to modify the form of his domination. This means that the pressure of the working class is able to force capitalism to change its internal

103 Ibid., 39. 104 Bracke, 2014a, 70. 105 Ibid.

composition. At this point the working class intervenes within the capitalist system as the essential component of its development.106

However, the workerist ideology of the New Left once again was seen by feminists as subordinating the role of woman and her autonomy, which led some of its women advocates to re-appropriate the strategies of class struggle. Fortunati justifies her passage from Lotta Continua to Lotta Femminista as such:

[t]his reexamined Marx, although powerful in comparison to the orthodox version, continued to remain blind towards the reality lived by women. So Potere Operaio’s discourse was very advanced in considering the new factories, the new workers’ role in the contemporary capitalist system, but it was very poor in considering housework, affects, emotions, sexuality, education, family, interpersonal relationships, sociability, and so on.107

Accordingly, Lotta Femminista in their manifesto written in 1973 claimed to offer “a new compass for the class struggle” with the claim that subordination of women within the family was as the apex of class exploitation.108

Woman’s subordination in the family was understood as the pinnacle of class exploitation, connecting all areas of private and public life, and offering “a new compass for the class struggle.”109 Women’s re-appropriation of their resources was the overriding strategy; it was to involve the waging of care work in the home on the one hand, and women’s control over their bodies and reproduction on the other. The key themes of the manifesto were the “salary for housework, the right to work less and shorter weeks for all, full control of one’s body, free and legal abortion.”110

106 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and against Capitalism (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008), 36. 107 Leopoldina Fortunati, “Learning to struggle: my story between workerism and feminism”, Viewpoint Magazine, Issue 3: Workers’ Inquiry, September 2013. 108 Bracke, 2014a, 82. 109 Maud Anne Bracke, “Between the Transnational and the Local: mapping the trajectories and contexts of the Wages for Housework campaign in 1970s Italian feminism” in Reconsidering Women's History: Twenty years of the Women's History Network, eds. Lucy Bland, Katharina Rowold (London: Routledge, 2014b), 115. 110 Ibid.

The examples might as well be multiplied; however, it should be clear that in each case Italian feminists self-narrated their demands against patriarchy and sought for new conceptions of autonomy and sexual difference through the strong arguments reflected on the language of their manifestoes.

CHAPTER 3

3. SETTING THE PARTICULARS

3.1. AIDIA (The Association of Italian Women Engineers and Architects)

During the 1950s, the years of the economic boom, the number of women in the labor market decreased in Italy “as women were substituted by young male migrant workers from the South.”111 This substitution was not caused by a deliberate intention to exclude them but because their inclusion had already been considered as a temporary one from the beginning which would possibly be interrupted by marriage, pregnancy, and maternal duties. Nevertheless, more women had been introduced to the professional life during the war, and their labor force was started to be recognized by the capitalist mode of production when the miracle was over which was facilitated by the changes in the family pattern.112 Thus considering the changes in the lives of the large masses in the post-war period, the questions on the women's role in society was already becoming a popular topic. Within this context, the Association of Italian Women Engineers and Architects, which is still active today, was founded in 1957 in Turin for the female solidarity in the professions of architecture and engineering.

Whereas autonomy, emancipation, and liberation are some of the important keywords for the women's movement and the feminist discourses of the time, AIDIA's was the solidarity which required an awareness of the difficulty for a woman to enter into technical fields in which they encountered hostile attitudes from male colleagues. In general, since AIDIA's foundation the recurring social themes discussed among the members and international counterparts have been women in the world of university

111 Sassoon, 108. 112 Ibid.

and the profession; discrimination on the grounds of career opportunities and salary; conciliation between family and work; and the motherhood. The professional women in architecture and engineering have been classified within three scenarios. Firstly, for the women working in the liberal profession as it was difficult to enter in the first place, the advantage to have a family network and to work in partnership with a male colleague was stressed. Secondly, the constraints for a woman working in private companies to advance in her career such as to be promoted to managerial positions or paid equally with male colleagues have been widely discussed. Lastly, married women were recommended to work in the educational institutions since it was the choice among others, which conciliates between career and family the best.113

In the first bulletin AIDIA published in 1956, the idea to establish communication between Italian women engineering graduates was dated back to 1948 when Maria Artini, an engineer and the director of Societa Edison di Milano, had proposed that professional solidarity might have been cultivated through personal relationship between people with several spiritual, intellectual and even material interests.114

Figure 3.1 The photograph of Maria Artini on the cover of the book entitled AIDIA 60, ed. Amelia Lentini (Milan:Edizioni d'Este, 2017).

113 Amelia Lentini, AIDIA 60 (Milan: Edizioni d'Este, 2017), 118. 114 Ibid., 11.

Accordingly, some Milanese and Turinese women engineers started to hold meetings which could not show continuity after Artini's early death.115 Despite this temporary interruption of the gatherings, both professional and cultural solidarity were still on the agenda of Italian women architects and engineers. Following the initiative of Artini, they re-started having meetings on a regular basis at the Baratti and Milano Confectionary in Turin and Caffe Florian in Venice, through which they decided to have an association for women graduates of architecture and engineering.116

There were four aims principally determined by the association's founding members in 1956: “to promote the exchange of ideas with cultural and professional aim; to evaluate women's work in technical arenas; to encourage reciprocal assistance in the profession; to cultivate cultural and professional links with similar associations in Italy and abroad.117 It was also emphasized that AIDIA was a cultural association which strictly rejected to be a political one.”118 As it can be inferred from their goals, AIDIA was an association of practical solutions to the problems women encountered in the professional life which tended to operate more upon a practical level rather than dwelling on a theoretical discussion on the side of feminism. In other words, they stressed the subordinated position of the women engineers and architects which tended to be strengthened because women were given secretarial duties, or research and consultancy tasks rather than being engaged in technical aspects. This exclusion, they claimed, also obstructed the way to have a promotion to the managerial positions. In fact, even when a woman had the required preparation and capacity to take on administrative responsibilities, she would not be admitted for the job only because she was a woman.119

115 AIDIA, “Prime Origini dell'Associazione” in Notizie dall A.I.D.I.A., n.1, Jan.-Feb. 1956. 116 “Fondazione”, ibid. 117 Rossi, 2006, 27. 118 AIDIA, “Statuto Sociale,” in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.5, 1957. 119 AIDIA, “La Donna nelle Professioni dell'Ingegneria e dell'Architettura” ibid.

Besides, the importance put on having relationships abroad was included within the essentials. Therefore, it should also be indicated that despite being a national organization, AIDIA was influenced by other foreign associations and influential women engineers even before its foundation. Beatrice Hicks, the first president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), founded in 1950 in the USA; Lillian Moller Gilbreth, an American industrial engineer and the pioneer in industrial-scientific psychology; and Women's Engineering Society (WES), founded in 1919 in the UK, are just few of the examples that AIDIA had made contact with.120

Through their bulletins, the activities of both Italian and international women were introduced, open calls for any contribution from the country and abroad for organizing assemblies, congresses were announced. Some prospective members of the association had also participated in international organizations, whether targeted explicitly at professional women or at the discipline of engineering in general, among which Pax Romana Congress held at Nottingham University in 1955 with the theme “From the University to the Profession” is noteworthy. In the Congress, one of the six commissions presented a study on “Women Graduates” of which summary was restated in the first bulletin as a report titled “The Problems of Young [Women] Graduates” -whether single, married or mother-.121 This report is significant as it provides a starting point for an analysis of the progressive nature in AIDIA's statements from the years of its foundation towards the end of the 1970s.122

Since the beginning, the frequent use of the phrase “whether single, married or mother” might seem insignificant or might be considered merely as a statement aiming at implying the inclusion or unification of every women engineer and architect in a broader sense. However, it also requires criticality when thinking about the dominant

120 Lentini, 14-15. 121 AIDIA, “Resoconto di un Congresso” in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.1, Jan.-Feb. 1956. 122 I should point out that my choice to limit this analysis by the end of the 1970s is based on the period this thesis concerns. Therefore, even though the association is still active today, the developments in the decades afterward will not be covered.

theme repeatedly appeared in the issues which is the incompatibility between the professional career of women and their domestic duties; between their responsibility towards society and family.

The report on Pax Romana Congress of 1956, makes a clear differentiation between single graduates and married ones, considering the former “better equipped to confront the difficulties of celibacy than those who have not had the advantage of superior education,” therefore, her responsibility is to “seek a field of action to devote herself to both for the others and herself.”123 If then, she decides to practice the profession “[she] must realize the effects this can have on her family life when she is married.”124 In this respect, the report almost warns the architect-to-be women or try to make them fully aware of the difficulties they would experience if they get married after entering into professional life. In other words, it promotes the status of being single almost like a prerequisite and points out the availability of the opportunities to young single graduates as they are free of family responsibilities enabling them to take an active part in society.

On the other hand, as for the other side of this equation, it was stated that “[t]he first duty of the young, married woman graduate is towards her family” and the commitment to their career is advised to be given a backseat. The education she has received must serve for the enrichment of her family life while she is required to “make every possible spiritual and intellectual effort for her personal development” with this object in mind.125 To the extent her domestic duties allow, she is also “compelled to

123 “[La giovane laureata nubile] è meglio equippaggiata a fronteggiare le difficoltà del celibato di quelle che non hanno avuto il vantaggio di una superiore educazione. [...] essa deve cercare un campo d'azione al quale potere dedicarsi, sia per gli altri che per se stessa.” In Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.1, Jan.-Feb. 1956. 124 “La giovane laureata che decide di esercitare la professione, quando è sposata, deve rendersi conto degli effetti che ciò può avere sulla sua vita familiare.” Ibid. 125 “Il primo dovere della giovane laureata è verso la sua famiglia. Essa deve compiere ogni possibile sforzo spirituale e intellettuale per accudire al suo personale sviluppo al fine di arricchire la vita familiare mediante l'educazione che ha ricevuto.” Ibid.

take an interest in the public and social life of her community and, [...] to maintain an active role there.”126 After the priority which should be given either to career or family was clearly assigned; how to facilitate and encourage the entry of women into technical fields became the central matter of debate.

The members organized their first national congress in Venice in 1957, the year association was officially founded. In the second session with the broad subject “The Women in the Professions of Engineering and Architecture”, it was indicated that:

[t]o enter into the profession is difficult for a man and even more so for a woman who finds hostilities at the beginning, especially if she wants to enter into a field of activity in which up until then a woman had never been introduced.127

Therefore “[i]n general, in order that a woman succeeds in practicing the profession, it is good that she is supported or at least introduced by father or a brother and that she works in collaboration with a [male] colleague.” This statement not only draws attention to the family background but strongly emphasizes the importance of the existence of a male partner to work with so as to legitimize her own expertise and existence in technical fields. At this point, the story of AIDIA's founder and first president Emma Strada might come to the forefront since she has been presented as the proof of this precondition. Strada is Italy's first women engineer graduated from Civil Engineering Department of Politecnico di Torino in 1908, ranking third in her class out of 62.128 Even her application to study engineering in 1903 caused perplexity within the Secretary of the faculty as she was the first case who had ever applied to do so. Therefore, they had consulted the regulations in case there had been any obstacles

126 “Essa è tenuta ad interessarsi alla vita pubblica e sociale della sua communità e, per quanto i suoi doveri familiari glielo permettono, a sostenere ivi un ruolo attivo.” Ibid. 127 “La libera professione è agli inizi difficile per un uomo e tanto più per una donna che trova in partenza delle ostilità, specie se vuole entrare in un campo di attività nel quale fino allora non si era mai presentata una donna.” “La Donna nelle Professioni dell'Ingegneria e dell'Architettura” in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.5, 1957: n.d. 128 retrieved from https://didattica.polito.it//avvisi/pdf/Emma_STRADA.pdf, (accessed in 18.4.2019)

yet found nothing against her admission.129 Yet, this is not surprising by any means, especially if one is acquainted with the fact that between 1867 and 1900 “there were [only] 224 women graduates in Italy” in total which did not show substantial increase at the beginning of the 20th century either.130

Figure 3.2 The portrait of Emma Strada, the first woman graduate in Civil Engineering in Italy and the first president of AIDIA.

Source: the propriety of Caterina Franchini, reproduced in Caterina Franchini, "Women Pioneers in Civil Engineering and Architecture in Italy: Emma Strada and Ada Bursi," in MoMoWo: Women Designers, Craftswomen, Architects and Engineers Between 1918 and 1945, ed. Marjan Groot, Helena Serazin, Caterina Franchini and Emilia Garda (Ljubljana: Zalozba ZRC, 2017), 83.

After her graduation, she first worked as the assistant of Luigi Pagliani at the University of Turin while also giving lectures on Hygiene at Politecnico di Torino.131 Yet again pursuing an academic career was another unusual choice for a woman which might have affected Emma Strada to collaborate with her father and her brother, both with a degree in engineering. I should clarify that the aforementioned precondition to practice with a male partner, particularly with a father, brother or husband, is not tried to be based on Strada's single case. Even 50 years later, this preference was still the

129 Lentini, 12. 130 Caterina Franchini, "Women Pioneers in Civil Engineering and Architecture in Italy: Emma Strada and Ada Bursi," in MoMoWo: Women Designers, Craftswomen, Architects and Engineers Between 1918 and 1945, ed. Marjan Groot, et. all., (Ljubljana: Zalozba ZRC, 2017), 83. 131 Ibid., 91.

general tendency for a woman in technical fields to ease their entry, however, considering she was the first president of an association which regularly advised this practical solution, Strada's exemplary case might have played a crucial role to guide young graduates.

When we continue to analyze their statements over time, without claiming to focus on comprehensively every single event they organized, the Third National Congress with the theme "The House"132 stands out as the meaning and production of domestic environments is one of the essential subjects this study deals with. In 1959 December AIDIA members met in Rome, the report of which was published in the 1964 bulletin. As this is a brief note to inform the colleagues, it is not possible to present every aspect that they discussed. Nevertheless, it could be said that they tried to deal with the subject within the socio-economical context of the development of the country as well as from environmental, scientific and technical perspectives demonstrating its evolution through time.133 Accordingly, the influences of urbanism on the prospective housing agglomerations in cities or countryside, the new materials and construction techniques, provision of services in the house are few of the several topics presented. As for the socio-economical point of view, they discussed mostly the issue of the right of all citizens to housing underlining the imbalances deriving from constraints and subsidies, the availability of the public services to residential areas. While it was stated that the house has always been a place in which women were expected to conduct various tasks; a place “acknowledged as our [women's] realm by tradition,”134 it seems that the participants did not raise questions explicitly on the relationship between the production of houses and the domestic duties and commitments that they have not necessarily complained about but accepted as the reality and even priority of a professional woman.

132 Notizie dall'AIDIA, n.7, 1958 133 AIDIA, “Conclusioni e Proposte dell'ultimo Convegno Nazionale a Roma” in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.10, 1964, 2. 134 AIDIA, “La casa, il nostro regno riconosciuto per tradizione” in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.9, 1959.

On the other hand, it was reported that after the presentations, the Roman Branch proposed to take into account other issues which could be more relevant to the goal of the association. Accordingly, they put forward such discussions as equal pay for equal work; to what extent this desired equality might justify the different treatments of women in the professional life; by what party the payment for the maternity leave should be provided to women, and so on.135 Such questions were not specific to the problems of the women engineers and architects, for sure, but instead widely discussed at that time by almost every Italian women's association of which reflections might be seen embedded in the women's movement of the 1970s.

In the 1950s the effects of the Catholic belief on the expressions of AIDIA might seem more apparent. Similarly, the idea to prioritize the family has not changed radically either in the 1960s. Rather than considering the professional life as an obstacle for the family, the adverse effects of family on the possibility of a career was started to be discussed. In other words, the family was considered again as the principal ideal and purpose for every woman but accepted that it also had substantial effects on their career opportunities.136 However, in the 1960s something was in the air for students, workers and women. The fact that AIDIA had clearly mentioned that it was not a political association does not mean that their attitude remained impartial to the protest cycle pioneered by the student's movement. The theme of their Fourth Congress was “The Reform of the School” which was held in Venice in 1967.137 Even though the title was meant to refer to the educational buildings, that of middle schools in particular, they also discussed the crisis in the faculties of engineering and architecture.

135 “Conclusioni e Proposte dell'ultimo Convegno Nazionale a Roma.” A.I.D.I.A., n.10, 2. 136 “E’ giusto ed è un bene che la familglia rappresenti per ogni donna il primo ideale e scopo, ma è anche veri che essa influisce sostanzialmente sulle sue possibilità di carriera.” in Notizie dall’A.I.D.I.A. Oct. 1961: 5. 137 Lentini, 34.

In the Congress it was stated that one of the causes of the crisis in the school is due to the fact that the University became that of the masses, everyone has access and not only the most talented ones, often coming from educated and privileged families, where the school's actions are assisted by the families.138 Regarding the University of the masses, it is well-known by now that both the introduction of the compulsory secondary education in 1962 and the abolishment of the university entrance exam in 1965 affected the number of students considerably. The number of university students has almost doubled itself in 1968 with 450,000 university students compared to 268,000 in 1960.139 As a consequence, there appeared some significant inadequacies within the education system, such as the continuation of the traditional curriculum, shortage of classrooms, and the lack of teachers. Such structural insufficiencies were doubtlessly among the essential motivations behind the dissatisfaction with the system However, rather than such inadequacies of the education system to adapt itself to the overcrowding population and new methods of teaching, what was central in AIDIA's criticism was the changing profile of the new-coming students as not all of them would have the required qualifications to pursue a career in architecture and engineering. Therefore, the way AIDIA dealt with this problem, overlooks the potentials of such reforms for the children of middle- and working-class families whose inclusion to higher education had not been a severe matter of subject previously. In this regard, another subject held responsible by the association was the ruling class which was accused of doing everything to increase the number of enrolled students to find support in the popular classes. Moreover, families were also blamed as they do not carefully evaluate the capacity and adequacy of their children.140 Ultimately, it was indicated that any solution could not be proposed in the Congress and that “any reform of the universities cannot exist unless the secondary schools are adapted accordingly.”141

138 Ibid., 35. 139 Paul Ginsborg. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. London: Penguin Books, 1990, p.299. 140 Lentini, 35. 141 Ibid.

By the 1970s the criticism towards the dichotomy between family and career experienced a shift for the sake of the latter. The women of the organization condemned the patriarchal pattern of the family. The family was considered as “a closed microcosm (in which man commands) in antithesis with the social macrocosm”142 As “the family, in its current form, constitutes the biggest obstacle to the women's liberation,” “it must be transformed into a nucleus open to the society.” Through this process, “even houses must be transformed [because] every battle for the liberation of women will be in vain if she is not relieved of the heavy duties of housewife [...]”143 The new organization of the house was formulized in summary by some physical interventions such as the integration of two or more units into one to form the home of a family, the reconfiguration of the kitchen and all the other services in such a manner that would free the woman from housework and allow her to carry out an activity outside the house.144 This formula was put forward by AIDIA as a new way of conceiving family life which had already started to become a trend within the social evolution in progress.

Marta Lonzi, the architect studied in this thesis, was not a member of AIDIA. However, as she is not articulated here as the representative of Italian women architects' experience in a broader sense, an analysis on AIDIA becomes crucial in providing with a complementary perspective. In other words, the activities and expressions of AIDIA is worthy of examination as it portrays, not a general frame but remarkable fragments for the experience of practicing women architects in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s which serves to enrich the comprehension of the Italian landscape in which Lonzi operated.

142 "la famiglia è un microcosmo chiuso (in cui comanda l'uomo) in antitesi con il macrocosmo sociale" in Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.20, 1972, 5. 143 "anche le case devono trasformarsi: ogni battaglia per la liberazione della donna sarà vana, se essa non viene sollevata dalle pesanti funzioni di massaia", ibid., p.5 144 ibid., p.5

3.2. Rivolta Femminile

Rivolta Femminile, literally translated as Female or Feminine Revolt, is one of the earliest and most influential feminist collectives of Italy. Unlike many others emerging in the same decade, it was not a group set up by active participants of the student revolts of 1968 but by the ones who were also subjected to Fascism and having memories of the War.145 Rivolta Femminile was officially formed in July 1970 with their First Manifesto circulated through the streets of Rome. Although signed collectively, it was written by the prominent figure, the art critic Carla Lonzi as the principal author together with other founding members: the journalist Elvira Banotti and the artist Carla Accardi, who is also one of the case studies of this thesis.146

Figure 3.3 Photograph of Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, taken by Pietro Consagra.

Source: Valeria Venditti, “Carla Lonzi. Un’arte della vita,” retrieved from https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/carla-lonzi-unarte-della-vita [Accessed: 10.08.2019].

145 Carla Lonzi, for instance, was born in 1930; Accardi in 1924; and Banotti in 1933, although the founding members were not limited with these three names. 146 Elena Basilio, “The translation of American radical feminist literature in Italy. The case of Donne è bello.” (PhD Diss., University of Exeter, 2014), 54.

This Manifesto, according to the historian Luisa Passerini, marked the birth of the Italian women's movement.147 Again in the summer of 1970, Carla Lonzi wrote another notable text titled Sputiamo su Hegel (Let's Spit on Hegel) which reveals, when considered together with the Manifesto of 1970, the stance of the group within the Italian feminisms of the 1970s.148

Since the First Manifesto, the definition and reconceptualization of womanhood were at the heart of their endeavor which required inevitably the rejection of the feminine image that had been created by men so far. Thus, according to Rivolta Femminile, as long as a woman’s identity was dependent on that of man, there would be no chance for women’s liberation. In their claim, the path towards liberation consists of woman’s self-discovery and its expression which would not be possible while accepting men in society as the model to be alluded to, as the ultimate and authoritarian subject. Therefore, the identification of women and the expression of the self must be based on the principle that:

Woman is the other in relation to man. Man is the other in relation to woman. Equality is an ideological attempt to subject woman even further. […] Woman as subject does not reject man as subject but she rejects him as an absolute role.149

Hence, the Manifesto warns women against the hitherto constructed myth that women and men complement each other. The collective emphasized that men propounded this idea of complementation as an instrument “to justify their own power” for it evoked a dependency on a responsible subject, a male image to take decisions, while women’s part had been constructed as care takers in the act of this complementing as in the case of the institution of family. In other words, they called for an awareness of division of responsibilities and advocated for searching for independent identities. Accordingly,

147 Passerini, 150. 148 Both texts of Rivolta Femminile are compiled within the book Sputiamo su Hegel: La Donna Clitoridea e la Donna Vaginale, ed. Carla Lonzi (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974) 149 Manifesto di Rivolta Femminle in Bono and Kemp, 37.

the aim was not “equality between the two sexes,” which was, on the contrary, blamed for providing men with the means to remain in power and control the ones without. From this perspective, equality meant a “world of legalized oppression and one- dimensionality.”150 Instead, sexual difference was advocated for the articulation of women’s new self-consciousness. According to Rivolta, women’s differences inherent in physical, social, political, and economic levels manifesting itself through different life experiences had the potential to be benefitted from. Carla Lonzi, in this matter, indicates that “woman’s difference is her millennial absence from history; let us proﬁt from this difference.”151

Figure 3.4 Maria Grazia Chinese, Marta Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, Anna Piva, Renata Gessner, Adriana Bottini and Carla Lonzi, members of Rivolta Femminile in Turicchi, 1975.

Source: Rivolta Femminile. La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 158.

The First Manifesto touched upon many prevalent discussions of its time, such as marriage, divorce, maternity, abortion, and so on. The members clearly stated their opposition to marriage by denouncing its institutionally male-dominant character in which woman was even more subordinated beginning with losing her name, thus her

150 Carla Lonzi, “Sputiamo su Hegel,” English translation ibid., 41. 151 Ibid.

identity. Maternity, on the other hand, was criticized in terms of the way women were destined by society to experience it, that is, deprived of the right to give her name to their children, obliged to raise a son who would probably “turn into a bad lover”152 by bearing the full load of unpaid domestic work which was interpreted as a means of survival for both patriarchal power and capitalism.

Within this context, the group criticized not only the society and its long-rooted male supremacy operated through its culture, but the revolutionary politics of that time, the New Left, Marxism, and class struggle. Their resentment against class struggle is already evident even in the first Manifesto in which Lonzi for the first time set forth the phrase “Let's Spit on Hegel” whom she accuses of excluding women from the classist theorization developed from the master-slave dialectic. This exclusion, seen as Marxism’s historical mistake, led them to “question socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”153 But the dissatisfaction with the revolutionary theories is even more crystallized in Lonzi’s article titled Sputiamo su Hegel in which she thoroughly explains her thoughts on the dynamic set of patriarchal relations of class struggle imposed on women in her oppression. She denounces that:

[w]oman is oppressed as a woman, at all social levels; not as a class, but as a sex. […] By trusting all hopes of a revolutionary future to the working class, Marxism has ignored women, both as oppressed people and bearers of the future.154

By the same token, it might be useful to remind that the First Manifesto ends with the sentence “[w]e communicate only with women” which, I argue, constitutes the core of justification of autocoscienza155 and separatism practices theorized by the collective to dismantle the predetermined cultural values; to unveil the power relations sustained

152 Ibid., 38. 153 Ibid., 40. 154 Ibid., 42- 43. 155 I am aware that the English translation of the Italian word autocoscienza as self-consciousness might as well be used, however, I prefer to continue with the term autocoscienza to distinguish its particularly Italian characteristics from that of preceding examples invented in the US towards the end of the 1960s.

through the oppression of women; to fulfill women’s rediscovery of the self since the ‘feminine problem is the relation of any woman […] to any man’156 but the solution passes through the relation and interaction among women themselves.

3.2.1. The notion of Autocoscienza

According to the members of Rivolta Femminile woman must discover herself through her own experiences and express and share her own identity amongst other women since it was unacceptable, as mentioned previously, to define women in relation to men. By dwelling on the question of what it means to be woman, the collective and Carla Lonzi in particular, theorized the practice of autocoscienza, the foundation stone of the separatist feminist discourse in Italy. It was put into practice through the meetings of small groups of women independent of larger organizations to share their experiences openly, yet it was not adopted at a larger scale by Italian women, thus cannot be used to identify the women’s movement.157

Figure 3.5 Carla Lonzi, Anna Jaquinta, Marta Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, meeting at Marta Lonzi’s house in Rome, 1977.

Source: Rivolta Femminile, La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 182.

156 Lonzi in Bono and Kemp, 40. 157 Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, 40.

On the other hand, the notion of autocoscienza did not remain as an internal theory to Rivolta Femminile either, but rather spread towards other feminist groups. An active member of another women-only feminist group Collettivo di Via Pompeo Magno, recalls her experience of separatism:

Carla Lonzi and Rivolta made us understand separatist practice. Thanks to this practice, I finally viewed myself with my own eyes, no longer defined by others. Carla Lonzi showed us […] what the essence was of being a woman. […] We needed a women-only process of personal transformation. The desire to be another kind of woman, someone who was allowed to define herself for herself, had always been present in me.158

Even though the traces of its conceptualization had already existed in the prior writings of Rivolta, its meaning was elucidated in 1972 through the remarkable text titled Significato dell'autocoscienza nei gruppi femministi (Significance of self- consciousness within the feminist groups) signed by the group collectively.159 The impetus of this text lies in its forceful language almost like that of a manifesto in terms of its clarity, repetitiveness and address form. The articulation of the argument starts with the declaration of women as a “defeated species […] by the myth of man”160 over whom man, belonging to the victorious one, claims his guidance to make women reach the dimensions of the subject, that is universal and human, reaffirming his superiority.161 This guidance is said to deceive woman into referring to man constantly for his approval of the evaluation of the self. In this regard, the collective considers whoever obeys man’s power exercise over her not worthy of recognition since “obedience is irreconcilable with autonomy to create in the other the stimulus to knowledge.”162 In other words, within the patriarchal system when feminism is not embraced, the upmost status any woman could ever reach is stated as a “supervised

158 Bracke, 2014b, 101. 159 Rivolta Femminile, “Significato dell'autocoscienza nei gruppi femministi” in Sputiamo su Hegel. La Donna Clitoride e la Donna Vaginale, ed. Carla Lonzi (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974), 141- 147. 160 “La donna appartiene alla specie vinta: vinta dal mito dell'uomo” Ibid., 141. 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid.

subject by masculinity”.163 That being the case, woman notices that the real obstacle towards liberation is every connection she has to the masculine world which, in return, stimulates a feminist autocosicenza and provides woman with new horizons where her creative action becomes possible to manifest itself, without the need of approval.

It is precisely at this point, the members of the group reclaim the right to their own space to be occupied solely by women, in which the faculty of knowledge would not be left to men. What is meant by their own space “is not a physical space -though there is also the physical space of which [woman are] deprived- but a historical, psychological and mental space.”164 Although in Rivolta’s text, the physical space is not at the center, the practice of autocosicenza, with its focus on the exclusive relationship between women themselves, has also reflections on the occupation of physical space.

Therefore, the appropriation of both public and private spaces through women-only practices merits more attention to understand how a feminist discourse, theorized particularly by Rivolta Femminile yet embraced by others as well, produced its own way of re-appropriating the symbolic and physical meaning of space namely through the separatist space practices. Subsequently, the feminists’ spatial interventions both at domestic and urban scales and their impacts on the urban territory will be analyzed.

3.2.2. Feminists’ Production and Appropriation of Space

The practice of autocoscienza, constituting not a common but an inspirational component of Italian feminism of the 1970s necessitated its own, autonomous space for their self-expression. Driven by the need “to differentiate themselves from others

163 “’soggetto sorvegliato’ dalla mascolinità.” Ibid., 143. 164 “non è uno spazio fisico -sebbene anche lo spazio fisico di cui siamo private- ma uno spazio storico, psicologico e mentale” Ibid., 144.

by appropriating separate spaces in the city,”165 this space was to be accessible to women-only, rejecting the socio-spatial segregation imposed on them. In such a space, physically separated from the institutional patriarchy of the system, women could meet up to share their subjective narrations of which reflections, on the other hand, were echoed in the public sphere, revealing women’s self-exposure to the public, thus making personal become political.

Breaking away from the conventional correlation between women and the domestic sphere both in abstract and material terms, the advocates of autocoscienza appropriated the space mainly at two levels. The first one is the changes in the organization of the domestic environment through house-meetings of feminist groups; and the second one, operated at the urban scale, is the production of women-only spaces such as libraries, bookstores, publication houses, cafes and so on.

Figure 3.6 House meeting at Marta Lonzi’s house in Rome, 1977. Anna Jaquinta, Carla Lonzi, Jacqueline Vodoz, Marta Lonzi.

Source: Rivolta Femminile, La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 9.

165 Elena Vacchelli, “Geographies of subjectivity: locating feminist political subjects in Milan,” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18, no. 6 (2011), 769.

However, what is striking is that the separatist space activities of feminist collectives blurred the boundaries between these two levels, thus dichotomies like public-private, starting from their attribution of new uses to the house. Organizing small-group meetings in women’s houses also caused the destabilization of the relationship between inside and outside. By this way, as Maud Anne Bracke puts forward, the inside represented a space “governed by mutual understanding and authenticity.”166 Similarly, the sociologist Elena Vacchelli explains the reasoning behind the selection of the house as a starting point for space appropriation as such:

[D]omestic subversion of the strict gender roles within the domestic sphere represented the first rupture with the Italian cultural establishment operated by the Italian feminist movement. To untidy the home, re-organize it according to a new use-value, inhabit it with different and new criteria, eliminating sofas and chairs, and adding carpets and cushions also meant freeing bodily postures and eliminating barriers between different spaces in the house.167

Figure 3.7a, b Photographs of Carla Lonzi’s house where several group meetings were held, Rome.

Source: Rivolta Femminile, La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 138.

166 Bracke, 2014a, 68. 167 Elena Vacchelli, “Gender and the city: intergenerational spatial practices and women’s collective action in Milan,” 2014, retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/cedref/1001?lang=en&fbclid=IwAR0L473bStNeCib1YaWtlSvxOwi K94ERYiowL67TfrJTu7i2qCuzdl8ulsg [date accessed 21.06.2019].

By inhabiting the house differently, the feminist women attributed to the domestic space a new meaning, a new use-value to borrow Vacchelli’s term which dissolved women’s traditional roles as care takers, mothers, wives and turned it into a space where they were represented as subjects, a status which was not given to them by men as a favor under the disguise of equality, but a self-discovered, gained one through the penetration of political into the house. Besides house meetings of collectives, the house was used even for the production and discussions of some feminist magazines168 reinforcing its transformation towards a site of production, thus becoming a part of the labor market.

Figure 3.8 Members of Rivolta Femminile at the house of Jacqueline Vodoz, October 1976. Angela de Carlo, Carla Lonzi, Renata Gessner, Franca Capalbi, Anna Piva, Adriana Bottini, Marta Lonzi, Maria Grazia Chinese, Anna Jaquinta, Maria Delfino appear in the photograph.

Source: Rivolta Femminile. La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 56.

168 Lea Melandri reminds that the magazine Lapis was produced in such an environment during her interview with Elena Vacchelli, ibid.

In this regard, how feminist women re-organized the space, e.g., replacing sofas with cushions, is not of central importance but the way they changed how to inhabit the house is noteworthy: free of barriers, free of assigned duties within static spaces. Thus, feminist creative action could take place without the obligation to conform with patriarchal values aiming at a collective transformation in society. However, the re- appropriation of the domestic environment was mostly temporary as it was pursued on the occasion of group meetings and remained as domestic environments at other times.

In this sense, the possibly temporary characteristic of this re-appropriation should also be pointed out which by no means implies that the separatist practice was not successful beyond house meetings insomuch as it remained temporal in changing the existing exercise of power within the domain of household. On the contrary, temporality is already immanent to the process of space appropriation. Henri Lefebvre criticizes the disparity this temporality aroused in people when discussing the relationship between class struggle and the production of space:

The events of 1968 in France, when students occupied and took charge of their own space, and the working class immediately followed suit, marked a new departure. The halting of this re- appropriation of space, though doubtless only temporary, has given rise to a despairing attitude. It is argued that only bulldozers or Molotov cocktails can change the dominant organization of space, that destruction must come before reconstruction. […] The problem with this posture is that it minimizes the contradictions in society and space as they actually are; although there are no good grounds for doing so, it attributes a hermetic or finished quality to the 'system.'169

Although Lefebvre did not include women’s movement in his equation, the very same perspective can be used to appreciate the spatial practice feminist women adopted in re-appropriating the space for their own use. Feminist women’s desire to appropriate urban space initiated through the interventions at the domestic scale as the first step was followed by the establishments of women-only spaces like libraries, archives to promote women’s histories, or even restaurants170 among which the publishing house formed by Rivolta Femminile is of special importance.

169 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 55-56 170 Vacchelli, 2011, 770.

Figure 3.9 Some Rivolta members in 1972, Rome in Maria Grazia Chinese, La Strada Piu Lunga (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1976).

Source: [database online]. https://www.libreriamarini.it/fotografia/la-strada-piu-lunga [Accessed: 15.08.2019]

a woman must have money, and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. Virgina Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

In 1970, Rivolta Femminile established its own publishing house called Scritti di Rivolta Femminile (Writings of Rivolta Femminile) in Milan, to remain outside the mainstream publications that the members considered as corrupted by patriarchal values. Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, was the first feminist publishing house in Italy of which formation pioneered autonomous writing activities of women and their circulation among themselves. At first, the writings of the members were published as compiled booklets as part of the Libretti Verdi series.171 Starting from 1980, another series called Prototipi (Prototype) emerged to which Marta Lonzi’s book L’Architetto Fuori di Sé belongs which will be analyzed comprehensively in chapter five. While the Green Booklets are the laboratory of the production of group’s feminist discourse

171 Libretti Verdi means Green Booklets which refers to the green covers of the publications.

mostly through the texts by Carla Lonzi, the architect Marta Lonzi’s sister, the Prototype series aims at offering a comprehensive reevaluation of the self against the pre-existing misconceptions of women’s identity while implying that such an attempt could not present a model for future efforts in this regard, but prototypes to consider.172

Figure 3.10 The cover of “Sputiamo su Hegel,” the first book Scritti di Rivolta Femminile published

Figure 3.11 Marta Lonzi, Cover layout for L’architetto fuori di sé, 1982. Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive at Fondazione Elvira Badaracco, Milan.

Source: Raffaella Poletti “The Marta Lonzi Archive: Subjectivity in the Creative Process” in Women's Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018) Toward a New Perception and Reception Helena Seražin et al., eds. (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018), 1111.

In the same period not only publishing houses but feminist bookstores, mainly based in Milan, began to emerge among which Libreria delle Donne di Milano (Milan Women’s Library) is the most well-known example which is still active today. The members of Rivolta clarified their determination to establish a publishing house in a catalog produced in 1978 as such:

[R]ejecting the endorsement of a publisher both symbolically and practically expressed out detachment from culture and made us responsible for ourselves […] But the real novelty of our

172 Bono and Kemp, 37.

publishing house is that we publish the writings of each of us who write (or will write) about herself. For us the point is to become aware that self-discovery passes through writing.173

This explanation clearly demonstrates that the writing activity became the medium to gain and express the autonomy of women; therefore, they posit themselves in the realm of publication; an intimate site of production of a feminist discourse which was detached from the dominant male culture. As Vacchelli indicates:

Feminist subjectivities in Milan have been shaped through the collective practice of consciousness-raising in separatist spaces. It is in this relational milieu that the narratives activist women established became important in deﬁning their changing subjectivity and providing them with a sense of their identity in transformation.174

It is obvious that publishing was valorized for Italian feminism in general, however, Scritti di Rivolta Femminile should be reviewed within the previously set framework that seeks to understand its spatial impact on the urban territory, providing women to raise their voices contesting the prevalent gender roles they had been confined with in newly conceptualized and realized spaces creating, in a way, a room of one’s own

173 [R]ifiutare l'avallo di un editore esprimeva simbolicamente, oltre che praticamente, il nostro distacco dalla cultura, e ci rendeva responsabili di noi stesse […] Ma la vera novita della nostra casa editrie è che pubblichiamo gli scritti di ciascuna di noi che scrive (o che scriverà) di sé. Per noi il punto è di prendere coscienza che la scoperta di sé passa attraverso la scrittura. in Rivolta Femminile, “Catalogo Casa editrice Rivolta femminile” retrieved from http://www.herstory.it/rivolta-femminile [date accessed 06.20.2019]. 174 Elena Vacchelli, “Geographies of subjectivity: locating feminist political subjects in Milan,” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18, no. 6 (2011): 769.

CHAPTER 4

4. AN ALTERNATIVE DOMESTICITY: CARLA ACCARDI’S HABITABLE ART ENVIRONMENTS

In the 1960s criticism of the domestic space and the notion of inhabitation appropriate to the contemporary conditions was a popular topic that captured the attention of both Italian artists and architects challenging the current state of society through utopian visions in accordance with the changing social and political climate. Within this context, between 1965 and 1972, the Italian woman artist Carla Accardi who was also a renowned figure of the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, produced three habitable art environments with an intention to depict another way of living. These environments, namely Tenda (the Tent, 1965-66), Ambiente Arancio (Orange Environment, 1966-68), and Triplice Tenda (Triple Tent, 1969-71) bear feminist concerns in their creation through which it is possible to trace the reflections of the experience of autocoscienza on Accardi and her spaces, while coinciding with the general anti-consumerist proposals of Italian architects and artists at that period.

The notion of autocoscienza, as discussed in the previous chapter, is essentially women’s rediscovery of the self and her self-awareness of her own identity without being defined in relation to man. In doing so, through the experience of “starting from oneself” which then penetrates into the feminine social reality through the self- narration of women, the female subjectivity could be manifested as it is considered by Rivolta the only way for woman to become complete human being. In other words,

autocoscienza “indicates to every woman the possibility of turning to herself and to her life as a resource for knowledge and autonomy.”175

Figure 4.1 La Tenda, first exhibited in Turin in 1966. The tent is made up of thirty-six painted panels out of the plastic material sicofoil.

Source: Lucia Re, “The Mark on the Wall: Marisa Merz and a History of Women in Postwar Italy,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, eds. Connie Buttler, et. all. (Prestel, 2017), 40.

Figure 4.2 Ambiente Arancio, 1966-68. The suit consists of a plastic umbrella, a bed with a plastic hood, and seven wooden stretchers wrapped in sicofoil sheets.

Source: Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, 71.

175 “la pratica dell'autocoscienza indica a ogni donna la possibilità di rivolgersi a se stessa e alla propria vita come a una risorsa di sapere e di autonomia.” Maria Luisa Boccia. L’io in rivolta. Vissuto e pensiero di Carla Lonzi (Milan: La Tartaruga Edizioni, 1998), 196.

Figure 4.3 Triplice Tenda, paint on Sicofoil, 270.9 x 451cm

Source: Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, 72.

To begin with a brief biographical sketch, Carla Accardi was born in 1924 into a family which was supportive of her inclination towards visual arts. Accordingly, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts first in Palermo, then in Florence yet left without having graduated. In 1946, she moved to Rome and met such artists as Pietro Consagra, Giulio Turcato, Antonio Sanfilippo with whom, along with others, she formed the art group “Forma 1” in 1947176 providing an alternative reading of abstract art. Both the significance of their name and their attempt of reconciliation between Marxism and abstraction are clearly seen in the first manifesto of the group published in the same year:

We hereby proclaim ourselves ‘formalists’ and ‘Marxists’, convinced as we are that the terms Marxism and formalism are not ‘irreconcilable’, especially today, when the progressive elements of our society must maintain a ‘revolutionary’ and ‘avant-garde’ position instead of

176 Other members of the group were Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Ugo Attardi and Achille Perilli.

settling into the mistake of a spent and conformist realism that in its most recent experiences in painting and sculpture has shown what a limited and narrow road it really is.177

Figure 4.4 Photograph of Forma 1 artists, Rome, 1947.

Source: [data base online] https://peoplepill.com/people/carla-accardi/ [Accessed: 05.08.2019].

In the successive years both through her appearance in the group’s exhibitions, and through her solo exhibitions of which first one was held in 1950 in Rome, Accardi received significant recognition from the prominent art critics such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Michel Tapiè, Lienello Venturi.178 Meanwhile, in 1949 she married Antonio Sanfilippo and had a daughter two years later.

Accardi’s paintings, particularly those in white on black produced in the second half of the 1950s, have been interpreted from a structuralist point of view as the “inversion of the traditional figure/ground relationship of the printed text”179 which the artist herself affirmed by saying that “[she has] given an image to the structuralist vision of

177 Accardi, Attardi, Consagra, et all. “Forma 1 Manifesto”, Rome, 15 March 1947 as cited in Juan José Gómez Gutiérrez, “The Politics of Abstract Art: Forma 1 and the Italian Communist Party, 1947-1951” Cercles. Revista d’Història Cultural 15/2012 p.121 178 Ida Gianelli, Carla Accardi, ed., Accardi. (Milan: Charta, 1994), 51. 179 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, p.68

the world.”180 Furthermore, looking at her paintings in retrospect, she explains adopting abstraction was “good for her” since she could not express herself through iconography, for its representation of male protagonists adventures for centuries, “their extraordinary achievements, their religious events, their conquests.”181

Figure 4.5 Carla Accardi, Labirinto Negativo, 1954

Source: Courtesy of Partners & Mucciaccia, London. Retrieved from https://mucciaccia.com/frieze- new-york-2-6-may-2018/ [Accessed: 01.07.2019].

Figure 4.6 Carla Accardi with her daughter Antonella and her husband Antonio Sanfilippo, Rome, 1964

Source: [database online] http://archivioaccardisanfilippo.it/site/?page_id=297#iLightbox[gallery-1]/2 [Accessed: 10.08.2019].

180 Carla Accardi as cited in Cozzi, 68. 181 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Carla Accardi, To Dig Deep”, Flash Art (International Edition), vol. 41, no. 260, June 2008 republished online in https://flash---art.com/article/carla-accardi/

Starting from the 1960s, her research focused on the relationship between sign and color (segno-colore), thus she reintroduced colors into her works.182 Moreover, the shift from canvas to the use of sicofoil, a transparent plastic material, came along with this research valorizing the chromatic aspects of paintings. Sicofoil became a crucial aspect for her successive works including the environments which were preceded by the experimentation of three dimensional objects, a series of cylinders and cones called Rotoli (Rolls). The use of this transparent plastic material was stimulated by her desire “to strip away everything that was unnecessary in art and to see what remained” which she further describes as “something made of light, blended, fluent with the surrounding environment- was a way to take away all totemic value from painting.”183

Figure 4.7 Photograph of Carla Accardi’s studio in Rome, 1965.

Source: [database online]. http://archivioaccardisanfilippo.it/site/?page_id=297#iLightbox[gallery- 1]/4. [Accessed: 05.07.2019].

Figure 4.8 Carla Accardi’s Rotoli at Galeria Notizie in Turin, 1965.

Source: Laura Iamurri, “Una cosa ovvia. Carla accardi, Tenda, 1965-66” in L’uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2016), 153.

182 Accardi and Gianelli, 51. 183 Carla Accardi, “Transparency,” Frieze d/e, Summer 2012, 28.

In the Venice Biennale of 1964, a room was devoted to Carla Accardi over the recommendation of the artist Lucio Fontana who took part in the jury that year. And her works was presented by Carla Lonzi184 with whom she had a profound friendship. Subsequently, in 1970 she contributed to the writing of the First Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile as one of the three main authors. Both Lonzi and Rivolta made a significant impact on Accardi’s career. Even before the foundation of the collective, the two already started to discuss about female creativity and their friendship played a pivotal role in the formation of the collective insomuch that Lonzi wrote in her diary referring to Accardi as Ester, that:

Rivolta Femminile was born precisely from two people, Ester [Carla Accardi] and I, who had questioned themselves about male subjectivity precisely because we had placed ourselves as subjects: Ester as an artist, I as an awareness of a 'different' identity. Vanda [Elvira Banotti], instead, brought to the formation of Rivolta the anguish of a confused anger, and she mobilized my energy for the pressure she exerted towards roads that I felt were wrong. […] What outraged me was her pretensions to use me as a brain without understanding me as a person. I felt instrumentalized under the label ‘for feminism.’185

In other words, it was Accardi’s trust and support that provided Lonzi with the required “strength and almost a physical well-being” enabling her to “begin feminism [and] to address others without fear”.186

184 Ibid. 185 “Rivolta Femminile è nata appunto da due persone, Ester e io, che si erano interrogate sulla soggettività maschile proprio perché ci eravamo poste come soggetti: Ester in quanto artista, io in quanto coscienza di una identità 'diversa'. Vanda invece ha portato alla formazione di Rivolta l'angoscia di una confusa ira, e ha mobilitato le mie energie per la pressione che esercitava verso strade che intuivo sbagliate. Erano le strade di una vistosa ri bellione nei canoni della vaginalità. Quello che mi indignava era la sue pretesa di adoperarmi come cervello senza capirmi come persona. Mi sentivo strumentalizzata sotto l'etichetta ‘per il femminismo.’” As cited in Boccia, 68. 186 “La fiducia che Ester ha avuto in me mi ha dato molta forza e quasi un benessere fisico. Questa fiducia mi ha permesso . . . di cominciare il femminismo, di rivolgermi alle altre senza paura . . .” ibid., 71.

Figure 4.9 Photograph of Carla Accardi and Carla Lonzi.

Source: [database online]. http://www.herstory.it/rivolta-femminile [Accessed: 10.07.2019].

The analysis of Accardi’s habitable environments from a feminist perspective positing them as sites of transformation or alternative feminist landscapes is also strictly related with the artist’s own introspection through her understanding of the self, life and art. In this regard, firstly, her shift from canvas, the traditional ground of painting, to full- scale environments with implications of mobile architecture is notable as it established a different kind of relationship between the artist, objects and the spectators. While envisaging a different kind of living and encouraging the viewer to experience her spaces, Accardi indicates that: “of my optimism, which was immature, it came out this desire to get rid of the addition and leaving the matter a little clean, a little balanced.”187 Thus, not only the materials and technics but the motivation behind her productions changed.

187 “Del mio ottimismo, che era immaturo, ne è venuto fuori questo voler liberarsi del sovrappiù e lasciare la cosa un po' pulita, un po' equilibrata.” in Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Milan: et al edizioni, 2010), 228-29.

Figure 4.10 Carla Accardi at her exhibition at Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, 1967.

Source: [database online] http://archivioaccardisanfilippo.it/site/?page_id=297#iLightbox[gallery-1]/7. [Accessed: 05.07.2019].

At the same time, another interesting episode of her life occurred between 1970 and 1971 during her teaching experience in a middle school in Rome. Accardi, overlapping with her feminist awareness through her participation in Rivolta Femminile, rejected the prior passivity and felt the need to make new gestures in the school where she indicates “witnessed the deception and repression exercised on girls.”188 She recorded her conversations with 11 to 14-year-old female students about sexual difference in which she encouraged them to share and question their life experiences, relationships with their families, particularly with their brothers. In this sense, she practiced the notion of autocoscienza with her students and introduced them the Manifesto of Rivolta and leaving the scene to students while they read it out loud in turn, without any rule. Thus, she created a fruitful discussion environment which in the end caused her dismissal from teaching over a complaint.

188 Carla Accardi, Superiore e Inferiore: Conversazioni fra le ragazzine delle Scuole Medie (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1972), 9.

She transcribed the tape records of the dialogues in the booklet Superiore e Inferiore, (Superior and Inferior), as to be used as a document for her appeal against the decree of her dismissal. She was accused of targeting female students who were too young to discuss such problems based on the argument that it would be more appropriate to deal with 16 to 18-year-olds instead. Accardi considered this justification as a constructed “myth of innocence which has always been imposed on girls as a synonym for happiness” yet in reality favoring their oppression.189 Therefore, she claimed that an earlier age was more suitable to prevent girls from being convinced of their inferiority as it enabled to influence their personality before they would be overwhelmed by sexual roles.

On the other hand, equally important is the fracture between Carla Lonzi and Carla Accardi which occurred around 1973 causing the latter to get distanced from Rivolta Femminile. The dispute essentially is a consequence of distinct perspectives of the two towards the possibility of artists to operate freed from the patriarchal culture. At the beginning of the 1960s Carla Lonzi was critical of the role of the art critic as someone who imposes certain expectations on artists with regard to their positions and responsibilities within a broader cultural context. In other words, she favored an interactive and communicative relation with the artists instead of adopting the position of an observer with a detachment from the creative process of art works.190 Accordingly, she wrote in the Preface of Autoritratto that:

[i]n recent years I have felt more and more perplexed by the role of critic sensing in it a codification of extraneity to the artistic act. I have come to see it as an exercise of power that discriminates against artists.191

189 Ibid., 10. 190 Giovanna Zapperi, “Challenging Feminist Art History: Carla Lonzi’s divergent paths,” in Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, eds. Victoria Horne, Lara Perry (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 109. 191 Ibid.

The attitude that Lonzi criticized was epitomized in the expressions of the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan who enunciated that “the [art] work exists in the context of society rather than in relation to the artist.”192 Responding to Argan’s claims some artists including Accardi denoted:

We declare with absolute certainty that under no circumstances can art criticism impose demands, nor outline programmes for the artist. We believe that Prof. Giulio Carlo Argan, chair of the Conference at Verucchio, has recently adopted a critical attitude that is incompatible with his role as […] historian of art.193

However, in time, Lonzi developed a more counter attack on the realm of art, by accusing it to be institutionalized within the power structures of patriarchal culture, eliminating any possibility of producing art works without the manifestation of male creativity. In that sense, the short text entitled Assenza della donna dai momenti celebrativi della manifestazione creativa maschile (Woman’s absence from celebratory moments of the manifestations of male creativity), signed by Rivolta Femminile in 1971, clarifies Lonzi’s refusal of artistic creativity, inevitably situating Accardi as a woman artist in an incompatible position with her feminist criticism.194 The conceptualization of the problem runs as such: the patriarchal creativity manifests itself “by men, for men” which denies women’s recognition as subjects but relies on their subsidiary presence appreciating the [male] creative protagonists.195 Therefore, it is proposed that “with her absence, the woman makes a gesture of awareness, liberating and therefore creative.”196

192 As cited in Teresa Kittler, “Living Art and the Art of Living: Remaking Home in Italy in the 1960s,” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University College London, 2014), 224. 193 The statement was signed by Gastone Novelli, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Toti Scialoja, Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Antonio Corpora, Piero Dorazio, Umberto Mastroianni. Ibid., 225. 194 Rivolta Femminile, “Assenza della donna dai momenti celebrativi della manifestazione creativa maschile,” in Sputiamo su Hegel: la donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale, ed. Carla Lonzi (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974), 63-65. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid., 65.

Lonzi’s total rejection of the art system, therefore, led not only her friendship with Accardi to end, but also prompted other women artists participating in Rivolta Femminile such as Anna Maria Colucci and Suzanne Santoro, to move away from the collective.197 Even though Carla Accardi’s engagement with Rivolta ended in 1973, the reflections of its discourse on her personal experience and understanding of art merit attention.

Figure 4.11 Carla Lonzi with the Italian artist Enrico Castellani at the exhibition of Carla Accardi at Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, 1966.

Source: Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Milan: et al edizioni, 2010), 207.

Accordingly, in this chapter the environments she created between 1965 and 1972 will be re-read within three main perspectives. The first one aims at positing these works within the artistic realm of the period, thus draws parallels to the habitable art phenomenon of the Italian art group Arte Povera, revealing on the other hand, their significance for the general Italian landscape. The second one scrutinizes the nomadic way of living inherent in Accardi’s environments suggesting the rhetoric of living differently through mobility and temporality. The last one searches for the feminist

197 Katia Almerini, “Il femminismo di Carla Accardi,” retrieved from https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/ricordi/il-femminismo-di-carla- accardi?fbclid=IwAR01R33mavdl3D6gZwlngyaoZHRkd6vQoL_ja4qX16ZqVo9yPXvCZW4pzT4 [Accessed: 20.08.2019].

concerns of those works in accordance with the appropriation of domestic sphere through the practice of separatism and examines the shifts in the artist’s standpoint in explaining them.

4.1. Arte Povera and the Habitable Art Phenomenon

Although Carla Accardi was not a direct member of the art group Arte Povera, she was often associated with it for her close connection with the members and her participation in the collective exhibitions. For instance, both Tenda and Triplice Tenda were re-displayed in the Venice Biennaale of 1976 in the section titled Arte/Ambiente (art/environment) curated by Germano Celant.198

In September 1967, the art critic Germano Celant coined the term arte povera, literally meaning ‘poor art’ over the exhibition of Arte Povera – Im Spazio held in Genoa199 which turned into a political art movement of which theorization was elaborated more especially by Celant in the successive years. In the exhibition’s catalogue he indicated a search for a new sort of art which would “take away, eliminate, downgrade things to a minimum, impoverish signs to reduce them to their archetypes.”200 Accardi, in a similar vein, described her productions in the mid-1960s and early 1970s by focusing on the act of taking away which seems to her the simplest gesture of experimenting and “a very refined part of maturity that is found in many artists.”201

198 Gianelli and Accardi, 51. 199 Robert Lumley, “Habitable Art: In and Around Piero Gilardi” retrieved from https://cms.nottinghamcontemporary.org/site/assets/files/1918/habitable_art-1.pdf [Accessed: 15.07.2019]. 200 Germano Celant, “Arte Povera”, in Arte Povera - Im Spazio, ed. Germano Celant (Genoa: Edizioni Masnata/ Trentalance, 1967) as cited in Roberta Minnucci, “‘Impoverishing signs to reduce them to their archetypes.’ An Introduction to Arte Povera” in Poor Art I Arte Povera Italian Influences British Responses (London: Estorick Foundation, 2017), p.7 201 Accardi in Autoritratto, 226.

It should also be noted that such statements might have led to some misleading interpretations which overlook the critical politicization of the art works embedded in the group’s stance by dwelling on its advocacy of minimalism from a formalistic perspective. Thus, the impoverishment of signs and minimalism of the art works have been considered as the essential of the group’s claim to be poor. Instead, Arte Povera’s urge to analyze the archetype is more of a desire to understand a system of relationships which was not related to the expectations of the capitalist system but relied on a direct relationship with the world, insomuch as it could inspire artists’ positions against any system.

Figure 4.12 The photograph of Tenda (Tent) at the Venice Biennale of 1976.

Source: Laura Iamurri, “Una cosa ovvia. Carla accardi, Tenda, 1965-66” in L’uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2016), 163.

Arte Povera’s close ties with Italy's political background is apparent beginning with Celant’s article, or rather the group’s manifesto published in November 1967 titled

“Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia” (Arte Povera: notes for a guerrilla war)202 addressing to a dialogue between politics and cultural production through a metaphorical guerilla fight attacking the consumerism. Its opening phrases is exemplary of such an attack and the comprehension of the group’s analysis of archetypes: “[f]irst came man, then the system. That is the way it used to be. Now it is society that produces, and it is man that consumes.”203 Therefore, it is a criticism of consumerism rather than a promotion of minimalism merely as a style. In other words, it is a return to the essentials of any cultural production in which the system does not hold the hegemonic power, but artists act upon free will as it used to be.

In the manifesto, Celant presents such key discussions as the current commodification of art objects and artists’ taking role within the mass production responsible for the satisfaction of “fine commercial merchandise” with a “kleptomaniac reliance on the system”.204 However, rejecting being a part of the capitalist system and its codified expectations “the artist becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and striking, rather than the other way around.”205 Through a selection of Italian artists whom he considers reclaiming their autonomy rather than the autonomy of commodifiable objects, he focuses on the ‘poverty’ in their work. The poverty might be said is to be found in their guerilla action against any system restraining individuals. Therefore, his research on poverty “refuses dialogue with both the social and the cultural systems” and “present itself as something sudden and unforeseen.”206 Thus, the word poor in the title does not refer to the poverty of people in any sense but questions the use value of art and criticizes consumerism and the consequent superabundance. In other words, it aims at

202 Germano Celant, "Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia," Flash Art 5 (November/December, 1967), 3. English translation in https://flash---art.com/article/arte-povera/ [Accessed: 15.06.2019]. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid. 205 Ibid. 206 Ibid.

a mode of direct relationship with knowledge, object and people outside the system. Similarly, Accardi wanted to draw a line between her artworks and mass production even though she was aware of the availability of the materials like sicofoil that relied on the development in contemporary manufacturing. She indicates that her “objects […] possess a lightness for those who contemplate them, if the viewer looks at them candidly and wishes to liberate himself from the heavy and conventional objects that have accumulated around him.”207

Within this context, Celant’s words for its opposition to American imperialism, and evocation of class struggle through his metaphorical guerilla action have been interpreted as the theory of a Third-Worldist intellectual who anticipated what was to come in Italy, that is, both the violence and utopian ideals of 1968.208 His guerilla warfare has been, therefore, associated with students’ movement’s slogan of “War, no - Guerrilla action, yes.”209

In this sense, the text inscribed on Mario Merz’s first inhabitable space titled Igloo di Giap (Giap’s Igloo) written by neon lights saying that “[i]f the enemy concentrates, he loses ground; if he scatters, he loses force”210 epitomizes the reciprocal relationship between art and politics, at least for majority of artists of Arte Povera. Through the bunker-like hemisphere environment covered by wrapped packages looking like sandbags of war barriers, Merz refers to guerilla tactics “mounting an attack on all the

207 Marisa Volpi, “Intervista a Carla Accardi,” Marcatre 42, May 1968, Milan as cited in Kittler, 2017, 106. 208 See Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera” October, Vol. 124, Postwar Italian Art (Spring, 2008), 8-30. 209 Ginsborg, 306-7. 210 “Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno, se si disperde perde forza”. Here, by inscribing this expression as a reference to guerilla strategies, Mario Merz addresses to General Võ Nguyên Giáp, a leading figure of the Vietnam War, and his anti-Americanism.

structures of political or visual oppression, not simply in terms of violence, but in terms of force in a dialectical relationship with the enemy and the context.”211

Figure 4.13 Mario Merz’ Igloo di Giap, 1968.

Source: Lisa Hayes Williams, “Nomadologies: Itinerant Objects and the Italian 1960s” retrieved from https://interventionsjournal.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/nomadologies-itinerant-objects-and-the- italian-1960s/

Both in the sense of the introduction of an ‘enemy’ to struggle with and that of the reference to a warfare, Accardi demonstrates parallel tendencies. The former, that is her resistance to the patriarchal culture proven by her involvement in Rivolta Femminile is also apparent in her retrospective expressions on her tent installations for their evocations of feminist concerns as opposed to grandiose acts of male ego.212 And, the latter, the reference to militancy lies in the inspiration she drew from the medieval Turkish tents as she was excited about their use both in battles and on journeys which she also considered as a “purely aesthetic act.”213 Therefore, her habitable art

211 Germano Celant, Mario Merz (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Milan: Electa, 1989), as cited in Lisa Hayes Williams, “Nomadologies: Itinerant Objects and the Italian 1960s” retrieved from https://interventionsjournal.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/nomadologies-itinerant-objects-and-the- italian-1960s/?fbclid=IwAR06qpiefmOGUg7kkU5v9SS3u-BTVKHq6tGzsJR1rM-9_m- hMLS6rl5g1rY#_ftnref 212 Kittler, 2017, 101. 213 Hayes Williams

environments reinterpreting the notion of domesticity might be conceptualized as “means and sites of transformation, challenging an enemy”214 just as Merz did so in his igloos. Particularly notable is that such a transformation rendered in Accardi’s installations denotes an alternative way of living, thus an alternative domesticity. She recently restated this desire for change in spaces of everyday life as such:

I did not like houses as they were at the time. I found them ugly, heavy… I had been an admirer of the Bauhaus, but I saw that people lived in houses that were tacky. As a result, I thought of creating an environment that would exemplify a spiritual and rarefied kind of living…215

Figure 4.14 Carla Accardi in her studio in Rome, Triplice Tenda (Triple Tent) in progress, 1970.

Source: Teresa Kittler, “Living Differently, Seeing Differently: Carla accardi’s Temporary Structures (1965-1972)” Oxford Art Journal 40, n.1 (2017): 102.

Even though Accardi has not accepted any straightforward perception of her tents as home, they inevitably propose a symbolic shift in everyday life and its spaces rejecting the limits of civilization like that of Arte Povera. She thought her temporary structures

214 Ibid. 215 Obrist.

offering a life that is “free and without the superstructures of civilization.”216 Besides, unlike Merz’s igloos, Accardi’s works are not there to be looked at from a distance but invites visitors, though in small numbers for its scale, to occupy and experience the space.

Nonetheless, providing a coherent narrative in which Accardi shows similar tendencies with Arte Povera and the conceptualization of the movement as the gathering of artists sharing the same political ideals to stand against consumerism would only be unilateral and misleading. It ignores the multifaced characteristics and diverse attitudes of artists through time. In the face of the urgent agenda and sometimes violent actions of the students’ revolts they adopted different positions. For instance, in May 1968 the artists affiliated with Arte Povera such as, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis were invited to take part in the Triennale of Milan which was occupied by students.

Consequently, after their exhibition having been cancelled, Fabro alongside with the art critic Carla Lonzi signed a text, which was also published in Lonzi’s Autoritratto a year later, indicating their opposition to the occupation. The text indicated that “[w]hile a Worker or a student is defined by his belonging to the working categories, to be an artist . . . does not coincide with belonging to a union.”217 Similarly, Giulio Paolini and Pino Pascali disawoved students’ criticism which was demonstrated once again in the occupation of the Venice Biennale of the same year through many slogans posted on the walls like “1964: Pop Art- 1968: Poliz Art”. In the artists’ claim, they were the victims of the struggle between students, who were criticizing artists for not being political enough, and the authorities, which Pascali described as “an ambiguous

216 Maurizio Vallarino, ‘Luminous marks’, in Art and Artists, June 1972, p. 33 as cited in Kittler, 2017, 91.

217 Lonzi and Fabro, Autoritratto, 230-231.

situation which in no way corresponded to the real needs of the Italian cultural situation.”218

Figure 4.15 Photograph showing the students’ demonstrations in Venice Biennale of 1968, taken by the photographer Ugo Mulas.

Source: [database online]. https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Venice-Biennale/93C736261B30A2CC [Accessed: 15.07.2019].

On the other hand, some others like Mario Merz and Piero Gilardi were inspired by the political activism of the upheavals. Just like the igloo attributed to Giap revealing the guerilla strategies, Merz’s another igloo structure from 1969, a combination of a primitive space composed of three branches, glass and steel with the textual lighting posing the question “Che fare?” (what is to be done?), reveals the political inspiration of opposition movements in his works.

The question is a direct adaptation of Lenin’s famous book entitled as the same which was republished in Italian in 1968.219 Merz’s composition of space and text, a visual manifestation of the semantic and the architectonic in his works can also be seen in his analysis of primordial, abstract and the existing spaces. According to him, while the

218 Pino Pascali, "Io la contestazione la vedo cosi," as cited in Cullinan, 21. 219 Vladimir Lenin, Che fare?, ed. Luciano Gruppi, (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1968). The book is known to have a significant impact on the discourse of Italian students’ movement.

first two were “not economically saturated”, the last one is, and thus commodified. He answers the question he posed on the igloo with a vision of utopia “to save the space in which we live from economic saturation, to discuss the space and the quality of the space of the future.”220 Hence, turning to archetype and primitivity is a figurative act to recover the current spaces from being part and parcel of capitalism.

Figure 4.16 Mario Merz’s Igloo, Che Fare (What is to be done?), 1969

The simplicity of Accardi’s environments addresses another mode of thinking and producing as well, another figurative act representing a rejection of the grandiose acts of the 1950’s Italian art. Accardi explains that minimalism in her works suggests

[a] point of view, which has always existed in humanity and has less visible manifestations that weren’t considered essential for success. They were obscured because they were considered details, and the domain of women, even though it’s not that men did not share this too. But since until now man had this desire to do grand things, always great adventures, all that phenomenology was studied. Instead this is a moment in which we are occupied with

220 Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Mario Merz (Torino: Fondazione Merz, 2006), 88. as cited in Hayes Williams

another type of phenomenology, of second-class people. Who has been second rung, it has been woman.221

As it can be understood by now, the politicized notions of Arte Povera which itself evolved over time are far from being univocal and are beyond the scope of the thesis. However, the aforementioned discussions briefly presenting the group’s stance are important to set the ground for the concept of the habitable art championed by the artists associated with it which also has parallels with the habitable art installations of Carla Accardi. In this sense, Accardi’s works have usually been dealt with alongside those of Merz and other artists especially by dwelling on the characteristic of nomadism and the changing perceptions of the way people relate themselves to the spaces they occupied. Moreover, she has been considered inspirational to both the movement and Mario Merz in particular for his igloos as proven by the success of her contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1976 as mentioned previously.

4.2. Representation of a Nomadic Way of Living

After World War II there was a significant need for housing in Italy as in many other countries. When the optimism of the so-called Economic Miracle of the 1950s was over, this question remained even more severe in accordance with the opposition movements revealing the discontent and skepticism of society towards architectural culture. On the threshold of 1968, as Manfredo Tafuri explains “began a phase of ‘waiting’ for an architecture seeking new roles, aware that ancient and recent myths were worn out.”222 Although such a conceptualization from quite diverse strands of architecture’s and architects’ roles are discussed previously, it can still be useful to remind this crisis to comprehend the new kinds of analysis and practices of people’s

221 Lonzi, Carla and Carla Accardi. 1966. Discorsi. Marcatre `, nos 23–5 (June): 195 as cited in Cozzi, 75. 222 Tafuri, 1989, 95.

relation to space. One of the areas the problem exposes itself the most is the notion of dwelling, thus the domestic spaces.

In a broader sense, dwelling and inhabitation had already been a matter of debate in architecture and modernity for the fact that dwelling in its conventional sense no longer coincides with the present conditions of the modern civilizations, thus the mode of living in the metropolis. In this regard, as Hilde Heynen points out modernity has been epitomized for its “heroic pursuit of a better life and a better society” which inevitably created a tension with the past, stability and continuity which might be clarified by Marshall Berman’s words that:

To be modern is to ﬁnd ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.223

Within this regard, Carla Accardi’s disapproval of the houses of her time but her admiration for the Bauhaus might as well be related to the transient and instable characteristics of its architecture since “things no longer allow themselves to be really appropriated”224 but emphasize flexibility and adaptability of the space. In the 20th century, the preference for transitory, transparent, changeable constructions and organizations over permanency and security was already a significant development which intrinsically altered the perception of everyday life and its spaces.

For instance, houses were replaced by hotel rooms representing a nomadic way of living appropriate to the contemporary conditions of modernity which, on the other hand, resembles Accardi’s Orange Environment in the sense that it promotes mobility and temporality by reducing the very contents of the house to what was considered essential to the contemporary life. The artist defines the organization of her

223 Hilde Heynen, “Modernity and domesticity: Tensions and contradictions,” in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen, Gülsüm Baydar (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), 1. 224 Hilde Heynen. Architecture and Modernity: a critique (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 113.

environment constituted by an umbrella, bed, mattress, floor tiles, as “almost the content of a home.”225

Figure 4.17 Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer, 1926. “a visualization of a new, nomadic way of living, based on transience and instability rather than permanence and rootedness.”

Source: Hilde Heynen. Architecture and Modernity: a critique (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 114.

Similarly, Germano Celant when discussing Accardi’s habitable art installations emphasizes the potentials of mobility and the consequent freedom offered to inhabitants to arrange the space personally, thus enabling them to lead their own way of living. He states that:

it is true that Tenda, the big umbrella, the bed, respond to the desire for a precarious space, a temporary and mobile architecture, a tipi or a tent that can be easily moved by the individual to accommodate their way of life.226

Moreover, the artist’s retrospective explanations prove that the decision to move away from the ground of painting to habitable environments was stimulated, starting from

225 Paolo Vagheggi, 2004. “In Conversation with Carla Accardi: Life is not art, art is life” as cited in Cozzi, 71. 226 See G.Celant, in La Repubblica, 19–20 March 1978 as cited in Kittler, 2014, 72.

the first tent, by the desire “to eliminate the dichotomy between architecture and the visual arts which was quite powerful at the time [and] to encourage people to live in a different and natural way.”227

Figure 4.18 Another version of Ambiente Arancio 1967 in the 1997 exhibition entitled Tele-carti.

Source: [database online]. http://galeriegretameert.com/exhibitions/carla-accardi-ambiente-arancio- 1967-tele-carti/ [Accessed: 20.08.2019]

However, the conceptualization of the essentials of life of the 1920s differs considerably from that of the 1960s. While the mobility and instability of the modern subject of the former period relies substantially on the industrialization process, thus connected to the infrastructure provided by the capitalist system; in the latter period the transformations in people’s life stand against the establishment or status quo challenging any fixed territorialization as epitomized twenty years later by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous definition of “war machine”.228 It is this kind of

227 “eliminare la dicotomia, allora molto forte, tra l’architettura e le arti visive [e] spingere la gente a vivere in un modo differente, naturale” Paolo Vagheggi, La vita non è arte, l’arte è vita. Intervista a Carla Accardi, in Carla Accardi, (Roma: Macro, 19 settembre 2004-9 gennaio 2005), 121. 228 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology— The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.

reading of nomadism which regained not only architects’ but artists’, and critics’ attention in the mid-1960s to elaborate on the shift in the human’s relationship to space within a broader European context. Just like Georges-Hubert de Radkowski’s pioneering essay ‘We the nomads?’229 written in 1963, scholars started to identify “a transition from sedentary living to modern nomadism” as they observed that modern subjects tended to refuse any fixation of home, thus became open to the idea of “temporary habitats” in an intrinsic relationship with the shifts in cultural and social climate of the post-war period.230

Figure 4.19 Superstudio, A Journey from A to B, 1969.

The group explains their decision as such: “[…] having chosen a random point on the map, we will be able to say my house will be there for three days two months or ten years. And we will set off that way (let’s call it B) without provisions, carrying only objects we are fond of.” Source: Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 247.

Accordingly, as in other disciplines like anthropology and philosophy, in the Italian architectural discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, the nomadic existence has become an

229 Georges-Hubert de Radkowski, “Nous les nomades?” (1963), rep. Anthropologie de l’habiter: Vers le nomadisme, ed. Augustine Berque and Michel Deguy (Venôme: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 149–58. 230 Silvia Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s,” Art Journal, 74:2 (2015): 63.

important matter of debate to search for mostly through the works of what is called as Radical Architecture groups for their temporary, inflatable, tensile and mostly hypothetical and utopian projects; and the habitable art installations of Italian artists like the ones affiliated with Arte Povera.

Figure 4.20a, b The inflatable objects of the Florence based group UFO (Carlo Bachi, Lapo Binazzi, Patrizia Cammeo, Riccardo Foresi, Titti Maschietto with, initially, Sandro Gioli and, temporarily, Massimo Giovannini and Mario Spinella), Casa A.N.A.S., Florence 1969.

UFO, between 1969 and 1972 produced a series of projects of Casa ANAS (1969-1973), filled with compressed air with a hope of its explosion, as a criticism of roadman’s houses (Casa Cantoniera A.N.A.S -L’azienda Nazionale Autonoma delle Strade Statali) of an obsolete institution scattered around the country. The group, while highlighting these houses’ outdated relationship with the territory and society, presents almost theatrical urban performances which have been interpreted as “objects without architecture”.231

It is obvious that modern nomadism has not been exclusively manifested through tent structures, though they are the most straightforward realization of the concept addressing a kind of contemporary appropriation of space through which new models of society might be proposed. Tents and other forms of temporary, inflatable structures might be seen as anathema to prevalent spatial phenomenon for they intrinsically

231 See for instance Maria Cristina Didero. “Radical Design Never Existed” in Radical Utopias: Archizoom, Remo Buti, 9999, Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, UFO, Zziggurat, eds. Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena, Alberto Salvadori (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017) 74-75.

eliminate consumerism due to their disregard of commodities, an abundance of objects of the capitalist system, which is in line with De Radkowski’s assumption that modern nomadism, as it empties the existence of assembly line and its services, dismantles capitalist definitions of labor.232 From another perspective, it can also be interpreted as a proposal of a utopian system which is inspired by the conventional nomadic life while benefiting from the technological developments and the availability of wide range of materials of the capitalist system.233

In this sense, because of Deleuze and Guattari’s identification of nomadism in their seminal text “Nomadology: The War Machine” as a dynamic and nonhierarchical organism which is in a dialectical opposition to State’s power structures and their introduction of the notion of war machine, crossing the preexisting constraints by forcing for changes in the system, the work has been used as the basis for modern nomadism discourse for analysis of artistic and architectural production of the 1960s and 1970s. Although much more complex than the organization of thoughts pragmatically adopted here, to set the ground how Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism and war machine are considered parallel to the works of Arte Povera artists’ resistance to prevalent hierarchies through habitable, temporary, nomadic structures; a clarification runs as follows.

The State maintains its power through not a real but an illusionary autonomy provided to intellectuals that becomes “a strictly dependent organ” responsible for reproducing and implementing its power.234 In doing so, however, the State causes the emergence of a body of intellectuals raising “new nomadic and political claims” which is what was to be avoided in the first place as such claims go against the norms and imply a different kind of division of labor.235 Based on a historical interest the authors ascribe

232 Ibid., 64. 233 Ibid. 234 Deleuze and Guattari, 368. 235 Ibid.

the invention of the war machine, irreducible to an apparatus of the State but exist in unconformity to its organizations, to the nomads while arguing that “an ‘ideological,’ scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine.”236 It is perhaps this potentiality which encourages the scholars most to consider the Radical Architecture and Arte Povera as possible war machines since they attempt to decompose the power relations of the system and its imposed cultural regime, or in Celant’s words “a way of being […] that aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen with respect to conventional expectations: an asystematic way of living in a world where the system is everything.”237

Lisa Hayes Williams in discussing the works of Mario Merz and Carla Accardi’s environments presents a reading by focusing on Delezue and Guattari’s theorization of the dialectical pattern between the State and its outside, the war machine.238 She ascribes the artistic production of both to the model of war machine which they simplified through a comparison between the games of Chess and Go. The war in Chess is a regulated and institutionalized one, for its space, and qualities and movements of its pieces are coded, in other words, each piece has its own properties and a limited inner logic to move, thus functions similarly to the State apparatuses. The game of Go, on the other hand, is a pure strategy of which pieces are anonymous and nonsubjectified, territorialize and de-territorialize through bordering, encircling, shattering with an aim to occupy the maximum space units with minimum pieces. Based on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words that:

[i]n Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of Chess…The difference is that Chess codes and decodes space, while Go proceeds altogether differently territorializing or deterritorializing it

236 Ibid., 422. 237 Celant, 1967, 3. 238 Lisa Hayes Williams, “Nomadologies: Itinerant Objects and the Italian 1960s” retrieved from https://interventionsjournal.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/nomadologies-itinerant-objects-and-the- italian-1960s/

(make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere)239

Williams sees a potential in Accardi’s environments to enact transformations “in and out of the mainstream and along the fringe” by embracing war tactics like Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine or Germano Celant’s guerilla warfare. From this perspective, it would be possible to argue that the tents and environments are smooth spaces in which any movement of the subject has the possibility to stay outside codifications by rejecting the sedentary dwelling. In Accardi’s case, the choice of a transparent material for the tents evokes feelings of dynamism and openness which creates permeability between inside and outside while achieving, on the other hand, separation and privacy through their sizes incapable to house large numbers of people at once. In doing so, as Leslie Cozzi stresses these environments suggest “a use that is at once personal and individual without being completely antisocial.”240 At this point it is crucial to go back to the artist’s own expressions to trace to what extent nomadism played a role in her conceptualization besides the interpretations of scholars. Carla Accardi in a conversation with Carla Lonzi explains her point of departure for elaborating on the Tent as such:

The idea of the tent was stimulated by a thought that came to me when you [Carla Lonzi] showed me those images of the Turkish tents at the Krakow Museum. I was impressed by the idea that Turks carried those beautiful tents with them on their journeys, battles, so that they could set them up later in moments that I imagine must have been very difficult. It seemed to me like a pure aesthetic act.241

239 Deleuze and Guattari, 353. 240 Cozzi, 70. 241 “L'idea della tenda è stata sollecitata da un pensiero, che mi era venuto, quando mi hai mostrato quelle immagini delle tende turche del Museo di Cracovia. Mi ha suggestionato l'idea che quelle tende, così belle, i turchi se le portavano nei loro viaggi, guerre, per piantarsele, poi, in momenti che io immaginavo molto difficoltosi. Mi é sembrato un atto estetico puro.” Accardi in Autoritratto, 226.

Figure 4.21 Tenda Turca (Turkish Tent), the second half of the 17th century, made up of cotton, silk, goltone leather, Krakow, Castello Reale di Wawel

Source: Laura Iamurri, “Una cosa ovvia. Carla accardi, Tenda, 1965-66” in L’uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2016), 161.

Although it remains to be researched if she restated such a verbal reference either to nomadism or to specifically Turkish tents, it seems that the idea re-appeared only in the short text Accardi wrote in 1980 titled Tende turche-Nomadismo (Turkish tents- Nomadism).242 She starts the text with an almost poetic description of a journey from the outside towards the interior of pink tents; while revealing a dichotomy between the need for a coverage, a shelter; and the aspiration to let go of the fear through transparency. The tents with its color pink, the color inside the body, besides that “of the sky, of air at sunset (on the terrace)”, offers a life which is like a dream, “[t]ransforming the emotional into intellectual and the intellectual into emotional.” 243

242 Carla Accardi ,“Tende turche-Nomadismo”, 1980 republished in Gianelli and Accardi, 28. 243 Ibid.

Figure 4.22a, b The interior details of Accardi’s Tenda

Source: Laura Iamurri, “Una cosa ovvia. Carla accardi, Tenda, 1965-66” in L’uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2016), 154.

What is even more intriguing is the way she immediately continues her passage by posing a symbolic relationship between genders, if not an implication of the sexual difference. She indicates that “[t]he subordination of woman was defined as a function, but black is not functional to white, they stand there contrary and adjacent to each other.”244 If we recall her black and white paintings of the 1950s in which she reversed the conventional hierarchy through white figures on black canvas, the association she established in 1980 between gender roles and black and white, can take another meaning as if she interpreted them as a symbol of the sexual liberation by overturning the traditional ground, thus the long-rooted subordination of women. It might seem as a speculation, however, Accardi’s other explanations provoke similar interpretations.

244 “La subalternita ` della donna fu definita come funzione ma il nero non e` funzionale al bianco, stanno lı` contrari e vicini.” Ibid.

For instance, in discussing her early works of the 1970s when she returned to monochromatic paintings on plastic with black, white, gray figures she indicates:

When I discovered that my crowded black and white signs were always signs of interpenetration, I understood the feminine condition for millennia. I can communicate as a human being a condition that comes from my gender. If it is historically oppressed, it will manifest itself with one type of symbolism (for example, permeability), if it is historically more liberated, the signs will show according to their own truth.245

Nevertheless, further elaborating on this subject might run the risk of over-imposing a feminist ideology on the artist, as her own explanations of her environments and paintings change remarkably towards the 1990s in which she tends to strip away the feminist connotations with respect her artistic creations as she puts forward referring to Ambiente Arancio that “[t]here wasn’t a philosophical or ideological thought behind it.”246 For this reason, going back to the issue of nomadism, although in Accardi’s account there is a gap in verbal explanations specifically referring to nomadic life between her initial statement of the Turkish tents as source of inspiration for her environments and the short text of the 1980, a sense of communal living is evoked in drawings and models, particularly when approached together.

The untitled drawing from the 1970s, republished in 1985 and a series of physical models of tents varying in form and exhibited in 1968 in Rome247, suggests a mobile, primitive community without the infrastructure of the production system as apparent in the former. While the models are like small scaled variations of her environments with different colors yet the same materials and figures; in the drawing a sense of primordial communal life is encapsulated through the addition of human figures and a landscape; although even the composition of structures are almost the same in both in which Tenda and Triplice Tenda can clearly be seen.

245 Anne Marie Boetti, “Lo specchio ardente”. Data, no. 18 (September–October, 1975): 52 in Cozzi, 78. 246 Obrist. 247 Kittler, 2017, 92.

Figure 4.23 Carla Accardi, untitled drawing, 1970

Figure 4.24 Carla Accardi, untitled (models), 1968 Source: Teresa Kittler, “Living Differently, Seeing Differently: Carla Accardi’s Temporary Structures (1965-1972)” Oxford Art Journal 40:1, 2017, 92-93.

In the light of the previous subchapters on Carla Accardi’s habitable environments, in terms of its coincidence and interrelation with the habitable art phenomenon of Arte Povera and their guerilla action fighting with the system as enemy and the notions of nomadism and temporality of some artistic and architectural productions of the 1960s and 1970s which can be interpreted as war machines in resisting the capitalist mode of production; the analysis of Accardi’s environments from a particularly feminist point of view remains crucial. Accordingly, in the next section, I will present an analysis by dwelling on the notion of autocoscienza and separatist space activities promoted by Rivolta Femminile aiming at a reading of the alternative feminist domesticity of the artist and the subsequent changes in her expressions explaining the environments she created between 1965 and 1972.

4.3. The possibility of feminist landscapes

It has been revealed by now how Carla Accardi’s temporary habitable environments resonate with the counterculture movement and anti-consumerist rhetoric of the artistic and architectural discourse of the 1960s and 1970s for their affinities with utopian thinking of living differently in an alternative model of society; free of commodities, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, resisting to the contemporary state of the capitalist system and civilization. Starting from 1965 with the first structure La Tenda, her creations encompass the moment of strong political and social upheavals in Italy and Accardi’s active involvement with the feminist group Rivolta Femminile as one of its founding members. What is at the center here is particularly how the artist correlates her works with and dissociates them from the feminist concerns of Rivolta, particularly the notions of autocoscienza and separatism; and to investigate their existence as feminist landscapes.

As discussed in the second chapter, autocoscienza meaning self-consciousness advocates women’s self-discovery outside any definition in relation to men and it is reinforced through sharing their subjective experiences exclusively among themselves. Therefore, such a rupture from the prevalent culture aiming at transformations of social and political subjectivity of women required an autonomous, women-only space which would enable creative female labor to manifest itself without the contamination of patriarchal production system. The significance of space’s appropriation and of its autonomy lies in the fact that space “in addition to being a means of production, is also a means of control, and hence domination, of power”248 which Italian feminists must have been aware and integrated in their production of spatial relations.

The separatist praxis of Italian feminists underpins different way of inhabiting the domestic sphere by appropriating the space in a way which would subvert the

248 Edward Soja, Thirdspace : Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 26.

traditional gender roles, thus, attributes a new meaning and use value to the house. While at an urban scale, separatist spaces enabled women to get together and collectively appropriate the space as we have seen in the example of the publishing house Scritti di Rivolta Femminile. By the same token, it achieved “a symbolic placement, a spacetime furnished with female gendered references, where one goes for meaningful preparation before work, and confirmation after”249 integrating once again the personal and political spheres. In this regard, the spatial segregation in the domestic sphere was of special importance for the Italian feminism of the 1970s as, in general, it “does more than creating a physical distance: it also affects the distribution of knowledge women could use to change their position in society.”250 Thus, with an aim to “represent themselves outside of the male hegemonic discourse and create their own discursive order” feminist women adopted separatist space practices starting from the house, considered as their symbolic prison.251 On the other hand, it is useful to remind that for Rivolta Femminile a separatist space was not only physical but it was also “historical, psychological and mental.”252

Just like autocoscienza groups appropriated the domestic realm by letting the political penetrate into the domestic walls through their house meetings, Accardi’s performative spaces might have been interpreted as “self-conscious reappraisals of the artistic gesture” proposing “new forms of social space that would both shelter and support female creativity”.253 All three of her environments, portable and temporary, indicates certain habitability and interaction while deconstructing the domestic borders. In other words, they are not merely iconic art objects but environments encouraging the

249 Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual difference: A theory of social-symbolic difference. Trans. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26. 250 Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, (Los Angeles, University of Carolina Press, 1992), 3. 251 Elena Vacchelli, “Gender and the city: intergenerational spatial practices and women’s collective action in Milan” https://journals.openedition.org/cedref/1001 252 Rivolta Femminile, “Signifacato dell’autocoscienza nei gruppi femministi”, 144. 253 Cozzi, 68.

presence and occupation of visitors, holding, on the other hand, utopian visions for a different kind of living from a broader perspective. As the artist elaborated in 1972:

The objects that I made recently are, broadly speaking, tents ...[they] hold a certain fascination for me; they interest me because they represent a way of living [that is] symbolically different – [a] life lived in the open, in contact with nature, with air and light, free and without the superstructures of civilization.254

Figure 4.25 Tenda, 1965-66.

Source: Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, 69.

Although tents and the orange suit can be considered as analogues of domestic space, and it is clear that they bear the idea of habitation, the ways critics dealt with them especially in relation to its form are not consistent. For instance, both during interviews with the artist, Carla Lonzi referred to Tenda as a cabin but not a house while Laura Cherubini asked Accardi about the idea to be her own architect as the driving force since “the form is that of a house” to which the artist replied by presenting Tenda as

254 Carla Accardi, Carla Accardi. (Milan: Charta, 1995), p.358. as cited in Kittler, 2014, 60

100

“the simplest idea of home” as well.255 Accardi’s own statements as well suggest a certain ambivalence in this regard as she expresses in 1989 that “[i]n order to construct an ‘environment,’ I made my first Tent, in 1965, the red and green one formed like a little temple (tempietto)” which, along with the fact that the artist “personally brought it all to completion” implies, according to Lessli Cozzi, the symbolic importance of the tent’s creation due to Accardi’s reference to a sacred space.256

However, rather than the varying descriptions of both the origins and forms of Accardi’s environments, the way she conceptualized them in relation to an alternative way of living is more of an interest here. In doing so, there are mainly two important time frames to be focused on. The first dwells on the 1970s for Accardi’s expressions regarding her environments with explicitly feminist concerns; and collaterally, the critics’ consideration of them as a feminist critique of the current state of civilization. Arguably, such a concern is most apparent in her justification of unfixed and unsettled characteristics of her environments when saying that she envisaged to produce something “destructible ... in opposition to a traditional masculine taste for the immutable, the imperishable.”257 As opposed to the grandiose gestures of masculinity, the indicators of the male ego, she turns to simplicity, temporality and mobility. The second centers around the artist’s rejection of any ideological purpose embedded in her works, especially towards the 1990s, though there are always ambivalent explanations both by the artist and the critics which are open to interpretations. For instance, in 1975 when her connection with Rivolta was already dissolved but her investment in feminism was still on the agenda, Accardi indicated that:

I didn’t want to make a new object, but to examine the artistic work, to take it from the wall and look at the frame was part of the arc of my history […] an investigation in and of itself, and then how do I know if these closed spaces will have feminine contents, a cure, something to counter neurosis.258

255 Ibid., 62 256 Cozzi, 76. 257 Causse and Lapouge,Ecrits, Voix d’Italie, p. 393 as cited in Kittler, 2017, 101. 258 Boetti 1975, 50 and Cozzi, 77.

101

There are a couple of things to pay attention in this statement. First, that she carried out a “personal” investigation of the frame “in and of itself” is noteworthy since she relates it also to an individual history. It addresses the female consciousness and the notion of authenticity accomplished through autocoscienza particularly when considered together with what she continues to argue about her environments. She further elaborates that she considered her environments as the consequence of a “faith in the authenticity of certain things that she felt like doing” accumulated through the discovery of “the feminine unconscious”.259

Moreover, as Cozzi argues, instead of drawing any straightforward conclusion about the possible “feminine content” of her spaces posing the question how she would know if it existed based on continuous personal exploration, might evoke the spontaneous and non-determined characteristics of small autocoscienza groups.260 However, even though such arguments are not necessarily indicators of Accardi’s will to create a separatist space as a prototype of the spatial praxis of those groups, they signal something of a mental and psychological space that Rivolta emphasized.

In this regard, what is striking is her representation of the feminine content as something counter to and the cure of the contemporary “neurosis” of the society. In other words, at that time the artist might have seen her environments as possible sites of transformation which were inspired or at least stimulated by authenticity as can be observed from her following expression:

[T]he other thing I experienced with self-awareness, is that I learn all this river of my unconscious, the female unconscious, (the unconscious that I had fiercely denied for years, I was of a very innocent rationalism after all) I found the trust in the authenticity of certain things that I felt like doing. Tents and environments, for example.261

259 Ibid. 260 Ibid. 261 “Però l'altra cosa che ho vissuta con l'autocoscienza, è che apprendo tutto questo fiume dell'inconscio mio, l'inconscio femminile, (l'inconscio che avevo negato selvaggiamente per anni, ero di un razionalismo molto innocente tutto som mato) ho trovato la fiducia nell'autenticità di certe cose che mi mi sono sentita di fare. Le tende e gli ambienti, per esempio.” Boetti, Data 18, 52.

102

Figure 4.26 Carla Accardi in front of Tenda, Galleria Notizie, Turin, 1966.

Source: [database online]. http://archivioaccardisanfilippo.it/site/?page_id=297#iLightbox[gallery- 1]/5 [Accessed: 05.08.201].

In this way, the artist both exposes her denial of women’s subordination for years under the name of rationalism and restates the female unconscious through autocoscienza which paved the way to generating the habitable art works. The only environment that coincides with her official involvement in feminism is Triplice Tenda, (1969-71), yet Accardi’s friendship with Carla Lonzi dates back to 1964. It is known that from that moment on the two continuously exchanged ideas about the role of artist, art critic and artistic productions in general, and Accardi’s art works in particular. It might be useful to remind that in the conversations the two held in 1966 and republished in Autoritratto in 1969, they elaborated on Tenda from the beginning of its production proven by the artists statement that it was stimulated by a photograph of a Turkish tent that Lonzi had shown her. Thus, the impacts of Rivolta’s feminism on Accardi’s perception and production of art could be traced prior to its formation. Similarly, Anne Marie Sauzeau-Boetti’s description of Accardi’s works underlines the importance of the process of self-discovery. According to Boetti, the late 1960s in the artist’s career was a moment of “ferocious introspection, the retrieval of her own historical condition”, thus her environments, with a specific reference to Triplice

103

Tenda became “the most free and totalizing point of a private voyage into cultural space.”262

The fact that Carla Accardi did not promote her environments as women-only spaces, the essential characteristics of autonomous separatist spaces in which to reveal women’s creativities outside the limits of patriarchy, and that the artist co-founded Rivolta Femminile only in 1970 might be misleading in comprehending the possibility of those environments as feminist landscapes. Instead of such a reductive approach, an analysis of their material and symbolic references unfolds their potential for an alternative way of living. The material aspects to be focused on for such arguments are mostly the transparency of her works blurring the dichotomies of the public and the private, and inside-outside, hence presenting an alternative mode of living which is fluid and open to nature, while offering a shelter; the mobility and temporality with a specific reference to nomadism for its anti-consumerist characteristics and more natural life free of any superstructure of the system; and their scale i.e., big enough to enable visitors to occupy it yet insufficient for communal inhabitation, similar to the scale and spontaneity of house meetings of small groups, with the exception of Triplice Tenda. This exception is, on the other hand, is said to be based on the artist’s engagement with the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile through which she recognized and prioritized the importance of the collective experience and production, thus increased the scale of Triplice Tenda accordingly.

Besides the physical characteristics of the artworks, the arguments about their being feminist landscapes rely on their symbolic meanings. For instance, the emptiness of the tents and the limited content of the Ambiente Arancio have been interpreted as a “dreamscape” which Accardi described as the fabrication of her imagination.263 Although the desire was “to push people to live differently and towards something

262 Cozzi, 79. 263 Obrist.

104

unknown”264 she also elaborated on their emptiness as an artistic gesture deriving from the act of taking away, emptying out, and thus “trying to live in a way that is not vulgar.”265 The artist metaphorically offers liberation from the oppression in the domestic sphere. Moreover, the successive physical models she made in 1968 consisting of various tents in the same composition and her sketch of 1970 again almost with the same organization implies that the artist had a communal and utopian vision rather than creating singular iconic objects. Therefore, her rhetoric of living differently is bonded with a vision of another system, freed of pre-existing power structures.

Nevertheless, in the later periods, especially since the 1990s, Accardi tends to strip the feminist connotations away in discussing the tents and environments, particularly with respect to the interpretations of scholars positing the works within a feminist framework stressing her ties with Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile. The artist expressed in 1994 that “the fact that others are politically engaged or ascribe a certain involvement to my work doesn’t concern me in the slightest.”266 By this way, the earlier associations made between her environments and her involvement in feminism become the imposition of critics independent of the artist’s intentions. Similarly, during an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2008, she indicated that:

[F]or me the work [the Orange Environment] meant to push people to live differently, in a more natural way. There wasn’t a philosophical or ideological thought behind it. The work dealt with the idea of an image, of a room. Behind it was the drive to push one towards something unknown that could become a different kind of living. Before anything, it was a fabrication of my imagination.267

264 Ibid. 265 Accardi in Autoritratto, 226. 266 “...il fatto che altri sono politicamente impegnati o colleghino tale impegno alla mia opera non mi preoccupa minimalmente.” in Joelson, Suzanne and Andrea K. Scott, eds. 1994. La differenza tra I sessi nell’arte. Tema celeste, no. 44 (winter): 63. 267 Obrist.

105

Rejecting any philosophical and ideological motivation is far from her earlier introduction of a possibility of “feminine contents” in her environments as “a cure, something to counter neurosis.” She rather emphasizes her continuous will to be a contemporary artist who would constantly challenge herself and avoid remained as rhetorical. In doing so, while presenting contemporaneity for what matters, she also explains her departure from feminism and politics which proves her recent exclusion of these subjects in discussing her works. Even though she still justifies her preference of abstraction over iconography based on female concerns since she considers iconography as the representative of male adventures, she also stands against the inclusion of politics within her art as something that blocks her creativity. In other words, although in the past she had “believed in being politically engaged” she, then, convinced herself that “when you start engaging with political specialists, you lose understanding.”268 Within a similar vein, she stopped thinking about feminism, as she eventually realized that “[she] was born a woman by chance, while [she] was not an artist by chance.”269 Similarly, she addressed her artistic productions in a gender- neutral way indicating that “[h]istorically, we all know what sort of problems women have encountered, but none of that mattered to my art […] I made sure I was called an artist, not a woman painter, and I worked without thinking about gender.”270

Nevertheless, Accardi, in parallel with the utopian visions of the artists and architects of the 1960s, offered alternative domesticities for her commitment to different ways of living and existence which became a leitmotif in her expressions whether accepting or refusing the feminism. In this sense, the artist in either case, searched for an alternative model of society, transparent and free of limits of the capitalist system, which could as well be turned into feminist landscapes in a utopian communal life, something to counter neurosis.

268 Ibid. 269 Ibid. 270 Arthur Lubow, “The Renaissance of Marisa Merz, Carol Rama, and Carla Accardi: Three Italian Women Artists Having a Moment.” Retrieved from www.wmagazine.com (W), 10 February 2017.

106

CHAPTER 5

5. A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN GENIUS: MARTA LONZI

Marta Lonzi, an active member of the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile is an architect whose productivity in architecture both in theoretical and practical senses has been overlooked in historiography. She is the sister of Carla Lonzi, the art critic and the founder of Rivolta Femminile to which she joined in 1970 by signing the First Manifesto of the collective. She had her own architectural office in Rome where she practiced actively without a partner until 1998; worked as an assistant in the University of Rome; and wrote books revealing her constant research on the creative process of architects criticizing the mindset of the modern genius in search for an alternative subjectivity in line with her commitment to the feminist discourse of Rivolta. In consideration of the lack of recognition of Marta Lonzi, her publications, mostly published by Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, are remarkable evidences to trace and analyze the architect’s experiences which could also be interpreted as self-recuperation of her visibility. Therefore, what is aimed here is to explore her feminist criticism of the dominant architectural culture in her theoretical writings and the impacts of her textual and architectural productions on each other.

The first thing to remark about the architect could be how strongly she internalized the feminist discussions of Rivolta Femminile advocating for the re-discovery of the self and reflected them on her own comprehension of architecture by essentially focusing on the creative process of architects and their subjectivity within it. Therefore, she has pursued a research outside the boundaries of the official architectural culture to find her own way as a woman and to come up with alternatives in both practical and theoretical senses. While practicing as an architect within the very same system she criticized, Marta Lonzi conceptualized her ideas in her articles and books in which she

107

analyzes explanations of the prominent architects of the twentieth-century yet does not include an evaluation of her own projects. In other words, she does not explain how the kind of creative process she advocated rendered in her architectural works.

Figure 5.1 Photograph of Marta Lonzi in Turicchi, Florence, August 1977.

Source: Rivolta Femminile, La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978),181.

Marta Lonzi considers her decision to be an architect as a natural gesture, her way to communicate with the world by creating spaces which would embody what she has prioritized as human values. It might be said that architecture for her is not merely a profession to carry out for a living nor it is an exalted field to be committed to for its capacity to alter the society; but “[i]t was her project to enter the world.”271 Therefore, considering this choice intertwined with her life experiences and personality, it is not surprising to note that her first book L’Architetto Fuori di Sé, (The Architect Beyond the Self), written in 1982, starts with this explanation:

It is how I chose to make a career of architecture: It was the synthesis of my values, those in which I believed most, which I needed most; the thoughts of my life day by day, the relationships with the outside world, the subsequent experiences and knowledge of me and the world, brought together in a project. […] Even today, when I design a project -my activity consists mainly of houses- I have in mind this inseparable union of human values and spaces.272

271 ‘Era il mio progetto per entrare nel mondo.’ Marta Lonzi, L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1982), 3. 272 ‘È così che ho scelto di fare architettura: Era la sintesi dei miei valori, quelli in cui credevo di più, che mi erano più necessari; i pensieri del mio vivere giorno per giorno, le relazioni con l'esterno, le successive esperienze e conoscenze di me e del mondo, fatte confluire in un progetto. […] Ancora oggi

108

She also denotes that this choice was stimulated by a photograph she saw in her childhood. The frame capturing Walter Gropius’ wife on the terrace of the couple’s house led Lonzi to imagine herself with her husband, her family in her own spaces.273

Figure 5.2 Photograph of Ise Gropius at the terrace of Walter Gropius House, Lincoln, 1938

Source: Marta Lonzi, L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 1.

In a sense, this simple clarification right at the beginning signals the intrinsic bond she establishes between herself and creative design process interwoven in an ever-ending loop. That is the valorization of human values and personal experiences in the creative process, rather than focusing on the architectural work as an end product to create within objective terms. On the other hand, the book itself, is an embodiment of Lonzi’s search of the self within architectural discussions, or borrowing Bruno Zevi’s terms, it is an ‘emotional autobiography,’ and ‘a pamphlet with a thesis.’274

quando progetto -la mia attività ha compreso soprattutto case- ho presente questa unione di valori umani e di spazi.’ Ibid., 1. 273 Ibid. 274 Bruno Zevi “Professioniste fuori di sé,” L’Espresso April 23, 1982, 188 as cited in Raffaella Poletti, “The Marta Lonzi Archive: Subjectivity in the Creative Process” in Women's Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018) Toward a New Perception and Reception Helena Seražin et al., eds. (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018), 1111.

109

In 1963 she graduated from the Architecture Department of the University of Florence achieving the maximum grade (110 out of 110) with the thesis: “Design of the bridge in correspondence with the La Piaggia quarter and urban development of the surrounding areas” which won the first prize of Italian Steel Application Union in the same year.275 During her architectural education, the masters of Italian rationalist architecture such as Adalberto Libero, and Ludovico Quaroni were still teaching there, among whom especially Quaroni had a significant impact both on her formation as an architect and on her academic career in the university. The summer of graduation, she along with two friends became quite disappointed when they learnt about Quaroni’s decision to move to Rome which they described themselves in a conversation among each other as three people abandoned by their beloved ones.276 Yet Lonzi’s connection with Quaroni was to continue within a few years in the university of Rome as his assistant where they also collaborated on competition projects.

In her experience, the entry to the profession gave rise to intimidating feelings causing her to pass “from the excitement of a voluntary apprenticeship intense with concentration and stimulus […] to a state of disappointment […] in an almost unexpected manner in the violence of its crisis.”277 Accordingly, Lonzi indicates that at those years since she considered herself unprepared and useless for a work experience in an architectural office, she was looking for a way to extend the years in the university through a scholarship with an aim to avoid practicing as a professional architect even temporarily. At that point of her life, she happened to fall in love which she describes as the thing, perhaps unconsciously, she wanted the most yet something that was not on her agenda.278 After getting married and having moved to Rome, while she was trying to figure out a solution of continuity between the university education and professional life, she started to collaborate on competition projects with friends.

275 Poletti, 1111. 276 Lonzi, 1982, 7. 277 “dall'entusiasmo di un apprendistato volontario e intenso di concentrazione e stimoli […] a una situazione di delusione […] in modo quasi imprevisto nella violenza della sua crisi.” Ibid., 6. 278 Ibid., 7.

110

Figure 5.3 Competition project for the Municipal Theatre in Cagliari, M.G. Dall’Erba, M. Lonzi, R. Maestro, A. Nuzzo, 1965.

Source: Marta Lonzi, L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 9.

The competition projects in collaboration with other architects as in the case of the Municipality Theatre in Cagliari, led the architect to feel detached from the creative process which she sees dominated by abstract decisions. To clarify this point, she indicates the main problematic as the annoyance she felt towards herself which was the same as that towards intellectuals whose theorizations did not correspond to their experiences.279 However, specifically referring to the creative process embraced she does not give any explanation on what particular points the decisions made by the group did not coincide with the real needs of both society and environment.

In 1967, she collaborated in the competition for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome which obtained a national recognition.280 The team leader was Ludovico Quaroni whose reputation might have played a further role in the recognition of their proposal. When explaining the setting of the problem the group members defined architects oscillating between two stances in the current cultural conjunction. On one hand, they argued, there stood architects with excessive skepticism towards “modern architecture’s real capability of new and valid realizations,” thus concerned mainly with the preservation of the pre-existing environment; and, on the other, there were those operating on the territories of utopia in an attempt to re-establish, on completely

279 Ibid. 9-11. 280 See Manfredo Tafuri, Il concorso per i nuovi uffici della Camera dei deputat: un bilancio dell'architettura italiana (Rome: Edizioni universitarie italiane, 1968), 90-97.

111

new grounds, the values of architectural work and the city as figurative facts. Their proposal, however, was to deal with this competition as an opportunity to elaborate on an experimentation of the expansion of the building in a manner which was “capable of shaking from skepticism and artificial escapes in the abstraction, sufficient to bring us closer to the design of the city and to the true resolution of problems of space, language, technology, organization of form-function.”281 Marta Lonzi, on the other hand, considers her contribution to this project as unsatisfactory, her participation in the design process as passive as can be inferred from her explanation:

I was processing the data the notice [of competition] required, but I passively followed the actual project [which had been] born overnight, I was blocked and interiorized […] I could not fit in or get excited, I did not understand. I was also surprised at myself; I did not know myself.282

Figure 5.4 Sketch of an interior view from the central core of the competition project for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, 1967. Group members: L. Quaroni, M. Lonzi, G. Esposito, A. Quistelli.

281 Tafuri, 1968, 90. 282 “Elaborai i dati che il bando richiedeva, ma il progetto vero e proprio, sorto dall’oggi al domani, lo seguii passivamente, ero bloccata e inferiorizzata [...] non riuscivo a inserirmi e a appassionarmi, non capivo. Ero anche sorpresa di me, non mi riconoscevo.” Lonzi, 1982, 11.

112

Figure 5.5a, b Sketches of exterior views, Camera dei Deputati in Rome, Quaroni’s group, 1967. Source: Manfredo Tafuri, Il concorso per i nuovi uffici della Camera dei deputati: un bilancio dell'architettura italiana (Rome: Edizioni universitarie italiane, 1968), 97.

Such a disappointment for her was not unique to this specific collaboration with Quaroni but valid for other similar experiences. This general dissatisfaction results partly from the fact that she did not actively participate in the projects the way she had expected and desired, but her contribution was limited to provide technical assistance. And, partly because she had broader suspicions about the creative process of architects within teams. She could not get thrilled over an idea of which origin she had not controlled; the specific reason for any choice. When this was the case, she felt obstructed, discouraged to take an active part, because architects’ decisions were not justified but provoked by an apparent superiority, rendered outside the self.283 Therefore, what she means by the self is correlated to the existence and expressions of subjective decisions of designers. In this regard, her passivity in the design process does not stem from any inferiority imposed on her within the team due to her gender or inexperience but Lonzi herself could not comply with the creative design process which she felt abstract, and happened suddenly. Nevertheless, it should be noted that

283 Lonzi, 1982, 12.

113

such an argument revealed itself at a personal level, not acknowledged by other companions as Marta Lonzi also points out by saying that she “was working with others, but alone in the disappointment.”284 It will later be shown how she felt overcome this isolation through the solidarity which she found in Rivolta Femminile.

Within a few years after her marriage, she had three children285 which initiated another significant episode in her life. In her experience, the maternity signified living in an entirely different dimension driven by two equal but contradictory forces: architecture and motherhood. She expresses how she confronted this duality at first as such: “I was considering myself the architect Marta Lonzi and I found myself mother Marta Mibelli. That is no small thing!”286 Although very much aware and focused on such a contradiction, she also remembers the anger she felt when a friend said that he always considered her more as a mother than as an architect, which bothered her so much triggering her fear.287 Nevertheless, it is clear that Marta Lonzi’s essential preoccupation in that period was to find a way to resolve this imbalance between the two different aspects of her life by escaping outside the two halves aiming at a self- unification. In this sense, it is noteworthy how she reflected this altering dimension of her life revealing itself with maternity on her consideration of architecture.

As she could not find herself within the living architects, she started to investigate the architectural works of those who had died or who she did not know in person. In this way, she aims at establishing a relationship between herself and what she would see and to clarify “what happens in that interval of thought that comes before the project and that the architect, while thinking, does not recognize as such.”288

284 “Lavoravo con altri, ma ero sola nella delusion” Ibid., 11. 285 Poletti, 1113. 286 “Mi pensavo architetto Marta Lonzi, e mi ritrovavo madre Marta Mibelli. Non è cosa da poco!” in Lonzi, 1982, 15. 287 Ibid., 13. 288 Ibid., 16.

114

In accordance with her desires to extend her time in university and postpone entering the professional life which was also linked to the isolation she suffered in her involvement in competitions, in 1967 she returned to the academy in the University of Rome as a voluntary assistant. She accepted the offer of Alberto Samonà to be his assistant in the “Architectural Composition” class with enthusiasm since for her it was “an opportunity to exit the isolation created by the family and sealed by the incompatibility with the colleagues.”289 After Samonà left Rome a year later, she moved on to Quaroni’s course, whom she knew from her university years in Florence and to whom she feels very close.290 It was an opportunity not only to break away from isolation, but to analyze and explain the creative process of architects which was at the center of her interests because of “[t]he discussions with students in front of a blank sheet to be transformed into a project.”291 Through her time as assistant she observes that the process consists of two distinct phases:

The first part was constituted by an exhausting research of data, problems, case studies, examples to put the problem rightly in the relevance of architectural and methodological thought. […] The second part, separated from the first one, because the passage is silenced and then ignored, was those of the idea already born, it is not known how, always from another idea, often chosen by the sympathy, more or less evident, that each one had for a model in his/her heart.292

According to Marta Lonzi observing that almost every student started a project by referencing to experiences of the others was not a surprise, since she also noticed such a general phenomenon in the profession. However, she states that this phenomenon requires an awareness with regard to its impact on students’ education in which the teaching body impels them to make preferences, for instance, for Louis Kahn over Saverio Muratori in their projects, thus legitimize their habit of not thinking.293

289 “un’occasione per uscire dall’isolamento che la famiglia crea e che l’incompatibilità con i colleghi sigillava” Ibid., 30-31. 290 Lonzi, 1982, 31. 291 “Le discussioni con gli studenti, con davanti il foglio bianco da trasformare in progetto” Ibid. 292 Ibid., 31-38. 293 Ibid., 38.

115

It is clear that the solidarity, she needed yet could not find either in her collaboration with other architects or in the academy, found in Rivolta Femminile. Among the Rivolta members, Marta Lonzi finds most similar to herself in terms of work experience are her sister, the art critique Carla Lonzi, and the artist Carla Accardi, even though each had a different educational background, thus different perspectives to analyze and to cope with the conflict created by male creativity through direct relationship.294 According to Marta Lonzi, however, the impact of the feminist discourse of Rivolta, was clearly observable in the work experiences of all of them, albeit in different ways.

Carla Lonzi in her book Autoritratto, (Autoportrait), through conversations with 14 artists including Carla Accardi presents a different perspective on the relationship formed between the critic, the artists and work of arts offering according to Marta Lonzi “new openings towards immediate reasonings with the art works.”295 What the architect refers to her sister’s unconventional attitude is, as discussed in the previous chapter, the way she challenged the role of art critics who were expected to distance themselves from the creative process of artists to analyze their works through the lenses of observers. Instead, Carla Lonzi engaged herself in an interactive and communicative relationship with artists as epitomized in her book Autoritratto,, thus opened a new perspective.296 Carla Lonzi, advocating autonomy and independence from the cultural canons which artists praise yet could not put into practice, consequently abandons her practice as art critic as a symbolic rejection of the “cultural production as being irretrievably marred by the footprint of the patriarchy.”297 Such a refusal gives Marta Lonzi comfort as it coincides with her disappointment experienced in the act of giving form to a project along with other architects, thus confirming that her conflict which she believed limited and personal is shared by others. On the other

294 Ibid., 27. 295 Lonzi, 182, 29. 296 See Zapperi, 104-115. 297 Silvana Annicchiarico, TDM9: W. Women in Italian Design (Milano: Corraini, 2016), 149.

116

hand, Marta Lonzi, due to her passion for the profession of architecture which she could not give away, preferred to continue her design activities in search for a way to act as a creative subject and dwell on the notion of authenticity in the process. 298 Along the same line, the similarity she sees between herself and Accardi is based on their recognition that their identities as subjects could not be supported, as it did for men, through the satisfaction with objects as total support for their lives.

Thus, Marta Lonzi, once again, became relieved as she realized that this dissatisfaction, she had was not an anomalous situation but a distinct value.299 Another similarity that she found between the two is Accardi’s sensitivity to light and colors differing from that of the architects. In fact, the two together in 1970 designed a lamp, “a mix of visual and architectural research”300 in the form of a cylinder which is covered by Accardi’s transparent surfaces marking her art works in that period.

Figure 5.6 Photograph of Marta Lonzi and Carla Accardi’s design of the lamp entitled “A L 70,” 1970.

Source: Silvana Annicchiarico, TDM9: W. Women in Italian Design (Milano: Corraini, 2016), 149.

298 Lonzi, 1982, 30. 299 Ibid., 27. 300 Annicchiarico, 149.

117

Figure 5.7 A photograph of the apartment of Rosaria and Giorgio Mondino renovated by Marta Lonzi, 1989-1991, Turin. The lamp of Lonzi and Accardi is seen on the left.

Source: Marco Romanelli, Marta Lonzi, “Domestic Interiors in Palermo and Turin” Domus, n.766 (December 1994): 137.

Besides this collaboration in design, in 1974, Marta Lonzi conducted the renovation project of Carla Accardi’s two-story house-studio in Rome. As can be seen from the plans below, through some changes in the spatial organization and the facades, the architect achieved more open and transparent spaces. In its previous state, the house was entered through a narrow corridor as the only element of circulation surrounding the isolated rooms, except for the small terrace opened to all four spaces. The upper floor, on the other hand, consisted of only a large terrace yet without a living area. Instead, Marta Lonzi eliminated the existence of a long-narrow corridor, integrated the kitchen and living room with each other while creating larger spaces through the elimination of some walls. The small terrace on the entrance level is turned into the artist’s studio directly connected to the living room. Lonzi also relocated the bedroom on the upper floor with the addition of a small kitchen and dining room, private yet enjoying the large terrace.

118

Figure 5.8 Former plan of the lower floor, Accardi’s studio, Rome, (color added by the author for emphasis).

Figure 5.9 Marta Lonzi’s sketch of the renovated plan of the lower floor, Accardi’s studio, Rome.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

119

Figure 5.10 Former plan of the terrace floor, Accardi’s house, Rome.

Figure 5.11 Marta Lonzi’s sketch of the renovated plan of the terrace floor, Accardi’s house, Rome.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

120

On the other hand, the way Accardi comments about this project somehow challenges the architect’s consistent emphasis on the communication with the client and designing houses according to the occupant’s needs when particularly thinking of the close relationship the two had those years due to their participation in Rivolta Femminile:

[…] Those were the years of feminism; I was part of the group "Rivolta femminile" with Carla Lonzi. Her sister, Marta Lonzi, designed this house. At first it was a bit different, Marta made everything gray and built of wood. The rafters were gray. Then I redid all white, for me it is very important, because the colors of my paintings must look as if on a white page.301

Figure 5.12 Interior views of Carla Accardi’s house, Rome.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

301 “…Erano gli anni del femminismo, facevo parte con Carla Lonzi del gruppo “Rivolta femminile”. La sorella, Marta Lonzi, ha progettato questa casa. All’inizio era un po’ diversa, Marta aveva fatto tutto in legno e di colore grigio. Le travi del soffitto erano grigie. Io poi ho rifatto tutto bianco, per me è molto importante, perché i colori dei miei quadri devono stare come su una pagina bianca.” in Laura Cherubini, “Accardi/Pivi” retrieved from https://flash---art.it/article/accardi-pivi/?fbclid=IwAR3Gl_jUh4jJzfVEtoG6p0GR1p1x1f- hDUFZeOFCwhKM9ggXd0slg93yl3A, [Accessed:15.08.2019].

121

Figure 5.13 Photograph of the room devoted to the artist’s studio, Carla Accardi’s house, Rome.

Source: Casa Italiana n.403 (October 1983), 6.

In retrospect, it is difficult to trace back the origin of Accardi's dissatisfaction with some choices in Lonzi’s design like the use of the color gray for beams instead of white for it would be more favorable for the artist regarding the relationship between her paintings and the surface. In other words, whether Accardi insisted on the white yet got convinced or even disregarded by the architect is subjected to the lack of further record on the process. Nevertheless, Accardi’s statements above are important to be noted since it points out the fact that despite Lonzi's remarkable efforts to conceptualize an authentic design process by taking the clients' thoughts at the center, the analysis of the extent the architect managed to incorporate them in her designs is bounded with an evaluation also from the clients themselves. Thus, such an affirmation of her success in this regard needs to be complemented with further insights outside Lonzi’s writings.

Carla Accardi’s house is not the only project that Marta Lonzi designed for an artist she met through her sister, art critic Carla Lonzi; it is though the only constructed one. Even before Accardi’s house, in 1971, she proposed a housing project, though not constructed, for the established Italian artist Pietro Consagra, who also draw the cover

122

of Marta Lonzi’s book L’Architetto Fuori di Sé.302 Moreover, Consagra’s names appears in the drawings as one the of the collaborator of the project.

Figure 5.14 Sketch of Marta Lonzi demonstrating the organization of volumes. It can be seen that instead of building a singular detached house, different functions are organized in three different masses differing from each other not only in their plan how they relate to the topography of the site which can be seen in the following elevation drawing. Even though there are a couple variations, in all of them, the so-called organic form of the masses, resembling the surrounding rocks in the site, thus the importance given to the compatibility to the site is a common feature.

Figure 5.15 The site plan of another variant. Proposal of housing for Pietro Consagra.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

302 Poletti, 1110.

123

Figure 5.16 Photograph of the south elevation.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

Lonzi in this book presents some anecdotes regarding her friendship with Consagra which started in October 1968. As Consagra and Carla Lonzi were a couple at that time, Marta Lonzi approached him with a sympathy like that of a family member and the friendship between the two developed also into an intellectual exchange of ideas.303 According to Consagra, while an artist is free in his profession, and in his activities; the architect is a conditioned subject by the technical factors rather than human experiences. In other words, he claims that architects have been bonded with certain conditions that society imposes in which they accept a certain function.304 Marta Lonzi, finds his critical attitude and “his irritation for architects” encouraging as it coincided with the disappointment she had as a young architect over the observation that the architects never claim their freedom of subjectivity in their practice.305

303 Lonzi, 1982, 20. 304 Pietro Consagra in Autoritratto, 179. 305 Lonzi, 1982, 20.

124

Figure 5.17a, b The schematic models of continuous curves, Pietro Consagra, La Città Frontale, 1968.

Source: Martla Lonzi, L’Architetto Fuori di Sé, (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1982), 19.

In 1973 Marta Lonzi decided to leave the university and voiced her discontent with university education particularly referring to the course of Quaroni yet presenting a more general observation of the architecture faculty of Rome. In doing so, with an awareness of the fact that she might have been marginalized by some academy members for her fundamental criticism and questions towards paternal attitudes, she relied on the support of Rivolta Femminile for it would prevent Lonzi from being prisoned in a new isolation. Hence, she left university with a letter addressed to Quaroni:

Dear Ludovico,

Last Saturday’s exams give me the opportunity to explain to you what the main subjects of contrast, of profound inconvenience that I experience when I am at the University are. They concern the relationship with the students, the meaning of experimentation and planning, the need for each [student] to operate according to their own authenticity and consistency. […] I also reject the contrast between lecturer and student . . . in the sense that it is taken for granted that a party possesses the codification of the design or in any case of teaching by imposing on the other party a relationship of acquiescence and almost of mythization of what is imposed on them. […] In short, it seems to me that all this allows only a precise relationship between teachers and students, namely that of mutual exploitation: on the one hand, teachers who need a mass of learners allowing them to exist and on the other, the students who place themselves as future candidates for an ever-equal power by denying themselves in a dialectical relationship with teachers. […] [I] think that a serious experimentation cannot be carried out to the end unless it is recognized the need to start with a cultural background [which would be] truly open to every possible meaning and value, ready to reach every possible result without fear of the new. The authenticity of the process will become the testing verification. […]

125

Since it is interesting for me to continue my research according to values coherently connected to my interest (but I recognize many other interests like those of the two students) in which I can follow and carry out a specific train of thought in turn connected to a behavior that only my own personal risk falls on (as an assistant I have always taken all my risk, as a practicing architect I have worked in a conscious and free position compared to various problems and arguments of the architectural culture, without calling external alibis) I see, now, that for the future I cannot fail to disassociate myself in a clear and definitive way from the course.

with love

Marta306

Marta Lonzi’s farewell letter does not only relate to her personal relationship with the professor but frames the key aspects of her criticism of the official architectural culture starting from the education in universities to her own refusal of culture through the search for authenticity. The letter states that the problematic situation that any idea of design outside the pre-accepted norms, or formulations, did not find a legitimate ground to exist, but remained criticized by the teaching body of the university. On the one hand, a specifically feminist critique cannot be inferred from the text as Lonzi does not associate the dominant values served to judge one’s design with patriarchy. Neither she criticizes Quaroni for his commitment to a male-dominated culture. However, she blames the professor, once she felt closely connected, for his ignorance towards any idea opposing to his, in other words, for his commitment to the dominant architectural culture imposed on students, creating future generations with similar positions to demonstrate in the creative process as an architect. Nevertheless, such a criticism of culture that she first put into words in 1973 was even more developed in time dwelling upon its refusal canonical culture through an analysis of its mechanisms.

This preexistence of truth that goes by the name of culture […] ignores the most tragic consequence that it involves: the annihilation of any other potential value that does not share this precise way of manifesting itself and thus of existing in relation to all other possible values.307

306 Ibid., 41-43. 307 “Questa preesistenza di verità che va sotto il nome di cultura […] ignora la conseguenza più tragica che con sé comporta: l'annientamento di fatto di ogni altro valore potenziale che non condivida questo preciso modo di manifestarsi e quindi di esistere in rapporto a tutti gli altri valori possibili.” Marta Lonzi, “Diritti della mia soggettività,” in La Presenza dell’Uomo nel Femminismo (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 12-13.

126

5.1. The Rejection of the Current Cultural Canon

In the second half of the 1960s, especially around 1968, it has been accepted that Italy experienced a general contestation of culture demonstrated widely by counter positions in both architecture and society. In the context of the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, Umberto Eco emphasizes that both culture and counterculture were equally overused terms of which comprehension requires a lexical analysis including everyday usages of the two besides meanings in dictionaries because “for every three people who talk about 'culture' at least one is thinking of a meaning quite different from that of the others.”308 Hence aptly, in order to understand Marta Lonzi’s refusal of culture it is necessary to define what culture in its current form meant for her. As she was an active member of Rivolta Femminile one simple starting point is to remember the collective’s stance against it.

The collective repeatedly voiced the need for women to detach themselves from the dominant culture condemning its male supremacy almost in all their writings and promoted to focus on personal experience and the re-discovery of the self, in other words, the practice of autocoscienza as discussed in the third chapter. Marta Lonzi followed the same trace and advocated autocoscienza and elaborated more on a critique including but not limited to the official architectural canons and conceptualized what it meant for her to reject it in her writings.

She indicates that “[c]oncerning the current cultural canon I cannot stand that presumption of being outside the self,”309 thus accepts “only those truths [of culture] that bring one's self into play while having no emotions for all formulations that do not

308 Umberto Eco, “Does Counter-Culture Exist?” in Apocalypse Postponed: Umberto Eco, ed. Robert Lumley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 115. 309 “Dall’attuale canone culturale non sopporto quella presunzione di essere fuori di sé” Lonzi, 1982, 57.

127

imply involvement.”310 She consistently indicates her opposition to any culture “behind which men have barricaded themselves” trying to impose a universal formulation of subject. This “false culture,” as she calls it, is impossible for her or any other women to practice since it implies “the annihilation of the self” with “the weight of a totalitarian truth” eliminating the possibilities to express any idea in contrast with those constructed and expressed by men for centuries.311 As can be seen, at the center of her critique of culture stands out the importance of the self and the possibility of its manifestation within it.

In this regard, it is not surprising that she gave the title ‘The Architect Outside the Self’ to her first book of which main body is devoted to an analysis of the mechanisms of culture. She analyzes those mechanisms in terms of the relationship between the self and the project; the role [of the architect]; the relationship with the client; and reflections on complexity, form and symbol. As a general criticism she indicates that

[t]oday’s architects complain about that a valid clientele has disappeared, but the architect disappeared before! He [the architect] does not anymore think or take risk for his work, for his truth, [he] does and undoes protected by the power of his role […] he does not know what he proposes […] because he speaks for others and not for himself. He is the architecture.312

The roots of such an ego can be traced back to her personal observations in architectural education. At this point, one of her memories of university years might be used for clarification of the power of architectural canons imposed on students to understand her counter stance developed in years in search for her own way to design, not outside the self but a manifestation of it through architecture.

310 “[…] della cultura accetto solo quelle verità che mettono in gioco l'essere se stessi, mentre non provo nessuna emozione per tutte le formulazioni che non implicano coinvolgimento: queste ultime formano gran parte del pensiero circolante.” Lonzi, 1978, 11. 311 Ibid., 11-12. 312 “Gli architetti d’oggi si lamentano che sia sparita una committenza valida, ma è sparito prima l’architetto! [...] parla per gli altri e non per sé. Egli è l’architettura.” Lonzi, 1982, 91.

128

In the early 1960s, she was the student of the renowned architect Adalberto Libera in the architectural design class. Lonzi explains the relationship between the professor and students as follows: since Libera was an aristocratic and distant character whom students could see at long intervals; the projects were carried out mostly with the assistants who were also in the awe of his ideas. Therefore, the meetings with the professor to receive revisions were “always fragile moments to submit to his judgements.”313 The theme of the course that year was the design of a neighborhood of affordable public housing and particular story which she still remembers almost fifty years later, is a proposal of a student which ignored the rational principles of Libera especially for his proposal of housing units, yet for Lonzi “it was a human-sized apartment full of attentions to everyday life.”314 She describes Libera’s reaction to it, far from tolerant: “without saying a word, took the big sheet and made it fly close to the drawing board; it glided at the end of the long, long table” around which they used to gather.315 However, it seemed to Lonzi that the student “have brought a breath of truth into that so all-encompassing and abstract course.”316

She observed the very same intolerance towards any idea remote from the imposed canons in the university of Rome while she was an assistant as explained thoroughly in her farewell letter to Quaroni. Accordingly, once again, the solidarity she found in Rivolta Femminile becomes significant in rejecting the dominant culture as she does not feel on the edge of a risk of another isolation, but rather provided with the required courage to disassociate herself from the official architectural culture.317 However, this rejection does not mean that the architect distanced herself from practicing, instead she pursued a solo career and realized many projects in her own office in Rome. Even though her projects, except her participations in competitions, are mainly houses

313 Marta Lonzi, Autenticità e Progetto (Milan: Jaca Book, 2006), 43. 314 Ibid., 45. 315 Ibid. 316 Ibid., 47. 317 Ibid., 45.

129

whether a renovation project or a newly designed and built environment, it is interesting to note that she also realized industrial plants. Considering the time period, one is in Rome and built between 1967- 69, and, the other built in Cagliari between 1973-74, they become noteworthy as it was far from a common tendency to assign a woman architect for designing factories.

Figure 5.18a, b The façades of the factory in Sestu, Cagliari. 1973-74.

Figure 5.19a, b Photographs of the interior of the factory, Sestu, Cagliari. 1973-74.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

Marta Lonzi refers by refusal of the canons to the necessity to challenge the abstract formulations presented as rationality by replacing them with a true or real relationship with the client and territory. In this sense, her refusal can only be understood

130

comprehensively with respect to architects’ stances in relating them with their projects in the process of their creation.

5.2. Creative Design Process of Architects

Marta Lonzi throughout her career ponders mostly on the creative process of architects manifested in the canonical architectural culture. Her research is built on an analysis of the relationship architects establish with the architectural object, thus inevitably changing the way they conceive architecture. It can be deduced from her refusal of the prevalent architectural culture and its mechanisms; she does not consider her position in creativity in the same strand with her contemporaries:

There is a wide gap between my attitude and that of architectural culture towards the creative process. As long as the object continues to be seen as the ultimate purpose of a project, much of its essence will inevitably be lost.318

Deriving from this wide gap she experienced, Lonzi delves into the phases of the dissolution of a creative process which she claims modern architects have forgot, with the aim to find a response to multiple problems of the present. She claims that architects who pursue a sublimated process “disguise their projects behind the concept of performing a service and pretend to hide, whereas he holds the absolute power.”319

If one recalls that when she felt isolated and disappointed during her collaborations with colleagues she retrospectively examined the works of the architects to establish a personal link between herself and what she saw, it is not surprising to notice that she once again re-reads architectural history to explore her own role as an architect. In other words, even though her aim is to find solutions to the problems of the present, she does so by focusing on the expressions of architects describing their design actions as she wants to trace how a project is conceived through how it is explained.

318 Marco Romanelli, Marta Lonzi, “Domestic Interiors in Palermo and Turin” Domus, n.766 (December 1994): 137. 319 Ibid., 138.

131

The kind of relationship formed between the object and the subject has been a central matter of debate repeatedly questioned in almost all her writings. However, her thoughts reveal themselves as the most mature in her book Autenticità e Progetto, (Authenticity and Project). In the book, the most severe problem regarding the built environment is presented as the new interventions implemented both in the historical centers and in the periphery recently opened to construction as she believes that the crisis of the architectural culture is encapsulated in the suburbs. However, she does not provide an investigation which questions the emergence of suburbs in relation to such preconditions as the growth of population and cities; economic conditions of the country and its reflections on urbanization, she prefers to dwell upon the substantial role played by architects and their responsibilities.

She argues that the current mode of urbanization causes an irreparable fracture with the pre-existing context leading the inhabitants to feel that they have been left “at the mercy of the most arbitrary experiments” of architects and planners.320 This is because “the important decisions concerning their life no longer belongs to the ethical and professional codes”321 but to the abstract notions embedded in their decision-making process. Hence, having conceptualized the periphery as an environment without soul, deprived of human values, she stresses that architects, to accomplish autonomy, isolated themselves from any context and invented suburbs as the new grounds where they could freely discard any reference to centuries-old systems as the basis of civil life.322 As the modern subject tends to identify one’s self within the act of thinking based on ego sets, her criticism centers around the way architecture has been perceived by modern architects:

[C]onceiving architecture, within a rational reasoning and regardless of the intentionality of the subjective will of the designer, has legitimized and legitimizes the arbitrariness of decision- making, the arrogance and the abstraction of the architect’s project […] This tautological spiral

320Lonzi, 2006, 1. 321 Ibid., 2. 322 Ibid., 3.

132

of design leads to the decline of the process and, therefore, of the object: no longer architecture, but cubature; no longer cities with a human dimension, but periphery, meaning soulless agglomerations; no longer territorial integrity, but fracture.323

As can be seen, she accuses architects concealing their subjectivity behind the abstract values of modernity of depriving the cities of soul; disregarding the natural and historical heritage; and, constructing upon the desire to make changes in habits and a social life. In a sense, this critique reaches beyond the architects will and attitude adopted in the design process and targets one of the very acknowledged status that modernity provokes. By breaking ties with the tradition modernity “frees people from the limitations imposed on them by their family or clan or by their village community, offering them unheard-of options and often material improvements.”324 However, for Lonzi, as also advocated by many others, the state of continuous crisis for change and the renunciation of traditions led to the loss of communication between architects and society. From her perspective, modern architecture is nothing, but a simplification particularly with respect to Renaissance, since “the consciousness of the soul as a reflection of the universal collective psyche has completely decayed.”325

At this point, it should also be noted that while the traditional accreditation of Descartes as the pioneer of modern philosophy and the modern self has undergone many reexaminations in the Cartesian scholarship avoiding any straightforward link between him and modernity through nihilism, Marta Lonzi’s reference seems in the same line with the criticism of the second wave feminism towards Cartesian view of objectivity. Essentially the feminist criticism of Cartesian metaphysics revolves around Descartes’ dualism that is the separation of the immaterial mind and the material body and argues that detached from the body, grasping the knowledge in such

323 Ibid., 8. 324 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge;London: MIT Press, 1999), 15. 325 Lonzi, 2006, 4.

133

a model requires as a condition of knowledge, a view from nowhere, thus the detachment from any given context.326

Even though whether such a criticism is valid or not is beyond the concern of this chapter, Lonzi’s interpretation of the modern self as the Cartesian derivation belongs to a similar mindset in the sense that, through a rationalized and legitimized objectivity of the creative act, modern architects ground every decision they take in scientific objectivity. Therefore, she argues that the objectivity cannot be the validation of architects’ position in taking certain decisions in their design because “each action is dependent on the will of the subject that performs it.” Accordingly, the relationship established between the object and its creator cannot be expressed in terms of an objective truth.327

Within this regard, underpinning her presumption that there exists a rupture in the dialogue between the self and the project rendered in the third-person expressions of architects, Lonzi emphasizes the need for an awareness that any project proposal cannot have an objective value, nor can it be elaborated in terms of total rationalization. At this point, as she takes the architect subject as the focus of her discussion, while overlooking different conditions and ideals of modernity, her criticism of Le Corbusier is clarifying:

Le Corbusier constructs for an abstract man, what he wants him to be; the new man. He elaborates his own universal principles to which humanity must adhere: a standardized, functional, practical, soulless and unidentified humanity, because he has a mechanistic vision of the life of men, of the city and of the home, as efficient engines, like machines to live.328

326 See for instance, Lisa Shapiro, “Mind and Body: Descartes’ Mixed Relation to Feminist Thought” in Descartes and the Modern, eds. Neil Robertson, Gordon McOuat and Tom Vinci (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) 327 Lonzi, 2006, 31. 328 Ibid., 41.

134

Instead, following the awareness of the arbitrariness that is at the basis of the objective claim of modern architects, she designates the aim as to reclaim the credibility and to propose solutions on behalf of collectivity by “putting at the center of his thoughts his life experience and his destiny to be mortal.”329 Only then “he [the architect] could deal with the expectations of humanity and overcome the obsessive stage of the exalting quest for an immortal destiny.”330 In the same line, she underlines that to make cities “finally beautiful to live and produce” architectural culture should give the priority to the “return to a new urban Renaissance.”331

Because the irrecoverable fracture between the past and the present merits more attention to conceptualize the way to regain the sensitivity of Renaissance architects towards human dimensions inscribed in the built environment, she pursues a comparative reading of the organization of the historical centers which she considers ideal and that of the newly built periphery areas conquered by the modern architect. She draws the conclusion that unlike the Renaissance architects privileging the universal values and creating a link between modus vivendi, the soul and the project; modern architects exist only as a testimony of a mechanical matrix.332 At this point we might look at the proposals that Marta Lonzi submitted to the competitions concerning the urban renewal of the project areas. One such example is her design, which had an honorable mention, for the “Competition for Urban Park of Navile Port and Tobacco Factory,” (Concorso per il Parco Urbano del Porto Navile e della Manifatturaa Tabacchi), in Bologna which was organized in 1984.

The project area was situated at the historical center of Bologna and asked for the design of an “Urban Park” for the Port and the Tabaco Factory. Lonzi explains that she started the project by asking two fundamental questions which she considered as

329 Ibid., 10. 330 Ibid. 331 Ibid., 7-8. 332 Ibid., 4.

135

methodological assumptions: (1)“Under what conditions the intention for urban park is appropriate in the specific reality of the site in question”; and, as corollary of the former, (2)“What ‘urban park’ could mean in this context and to this dimension?”333 Following these questions, she focuses on the zones immediately surrounding the area, without increasing the scale towards far ends of the center, to comprehend the negative consequences that might arise from the absence of historical awareness providing a guidance on developing a planning intervention in the pre-existing context.

Figure 5.20 Photograph of a preliminary sketch of Marta Lonzi showing the site in its existing state.

She starts her site analysis with the observation of two main axes crossing the area. The first one is in north-south direction (colored in blue), and starts from Via Fratelli Rosselli, passes through the former Forno del Pane building and reaches the Tobacco factory building. The second axis, in Northeast- southwest direction, (colored in gray), starts from the buildings of the former slaughterhouse and reaches Largo Caduti del Lavoro. 1-Forno del Pane (bread bakery); 2- Former slaughter house; 3- Storage building of the Tobacco Factory; 4-Tobacco Factory Building (Manifattura Tabacchi). (colors and numbers are added by the author)

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

At this point, it should be noted that even before moving onto to her analysis of the urban environment, she first remarks about the fact that in the regulations of the

333 “a quali condizioni è opportuna la destinazione a parco urbano nella realtà specifica dell'arca in questione? E, quindi, come corollario: "che cosa può significare 'parco urbano' in questo contesto e a questa dimensione?” Marta Lonzi in Il labirinto, ed. Comune di Bologna; Assesorato alla Progettazione e Attuazione. (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1985), 309.

136

competition, it is advised to demolish the former tobacco storage building unless the participants come up with a solution with a reliable reuse proposal considering the impacts of the future urban park and the economic feasibility of such a conservation. Instead, Lonzi argues that preserving the former building cannot be approached in financial terms, but rather, it can only be “saved and used in the conscious will to recover a testimony that belongs to us and of which we are custodians.”334

Figure 5.21 Photograph of Lonzi’s sketch showing the eight renovated facilities that she proposed.

The colored buildings, added by the author, demonstrates that all three historical buildings which also appear in the first analysis sketch which are the Factory building on the right, the bread bakery (Forno del Pane) on the left, and the storage building at the intersection of the axes.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

At the initial stage, Marta Lonzi attributed a particular interest to the building of Forno del Pane, with its 80 meters long façade resembling that of royal palaces, for it has the potential to become a node of the Park’s social facilities. Hence, she determined it as the southern entrance of the project.

She makes another observation of the pre-existing context with respect to the former factory building. Lonzi indicated that this building in its existent state was out of scale

334 “… salvati e utilizzati nella volontà cosciente di recuperare una testimonianza che ci appartiene e di cui siamo custodi.” Ibid.

137

due to the size of the adjacent buildings. Therefore, she planned a reorganization of the urban layout structured in an organic spatial succession of new facilities while a visual isolation of the factory from its surroundings is supported by poplar trees also serving as a reminder of the waterways and the courtyards of the Emilian houses.335 Moreover, she hopes that if a general reorganizational plan of the Navile Canal area is to be done, this symbolic reference to waterways through poplar trees would be accompanied by the real presence.336

Figure 5.22a, b Marta Lonzi’s sketches of Forno del Pane.

Source: Il labirinto, ed. Comune di Bologna; Assesorato alla Progettazione e Attuazione. (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1985), 311.

Figure 5.23 Sketch of the existing state of the apartment buildings adjacent to the factory.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

335 See Figure 60 for the 8 fundamental architectonic interventions of the architect: 1-Village of Castellaccio; 2- Green area achieved through the demolition of the building n.29 of via Azzogardino; 3- The entrance of the old Factory storage; 4- Sequence of buildings with terraced housing, the location of the CRAL; 5- The area of the existing warehouse that stands in front of the former Forno del Pane building; 6- The area of the former Slaughterhouse; 7- Area of the townhouse of the former monastery; 8- The area delimited by new low-rise buildings. 336 Lonzi in Il Labirinto, 310.

138

The first of the two interventions she pursued is related to the façades of the surrounding buildings which she thought designed as if aiming at disappearing. Thus, with a self-supporting structural system of iron and glass, she renovated those façades including the ones behind the boundary walls of which elevations faces towards the Park, so that the apartments would be equipped with new profiles, light and transparent.

Figure 5.24 Sketch of the view towards the factory building depicting its relationship with the pre- existing buildings with their new facades.

Figure 5.25 Photograph of the physical model showing an example of the renovated facades.

Source: Marta Lonzi Archive.

139

The second intervention intended for restoration is the re-arrangement of the relationship between the Forno del Pane building and its surroundings. She proposes to add two pairs of imposing arches of entrance, “a 19th century reminiscence that refers to Renaissance entrances of historical palaces,” inspired, on the other hand, by the “dramatic” arches of Karl Marx Hof. In doing so she aims at increasing the perception of the Park from the city.337

Figure 5.26 Photograph of the sketch demonstrating renovated building of Pane, opened to the city and the park.

Source: Il labirinto, ed. Comune di Bologna; Assesorato alla Progettazione e Attuazione. (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1985), 311.

I would argue that her concluding remarks affirm that what she has defined in her writings as the “new urban Renaissance” to be searched for to overcome the problems of metropolis is attempted to be realized in her competition proposals at an urban scale such as this one. Through the site analysis and involvement of historical references whether deriving from the site itself with the historical buildings existing in the area, or solutions inspired by Renaissance architecture proven to be working, she proposed

the stages of a process that is considered as a methodological postulate, as a constraint to operate, the factual reality existing in the territory, without breaking it or attacking it, but recovering it in both its positive and negative episodes.338

337 Ibid., 311. 338 Ibid.

140

5.2.1. Sublimation vs Authenticity

According to Marta Lonzi there are mainly two distinct phenomenon of creative process, two opposite attitudes she observed through first-hand experiences and analysis of the works of the past, which are sublimated and authentic. She uses sublimation and authenticity as two antithetical terms to describe two different phenomena of the creative process regardless of the scale of the action. While the first one does not belong to her, the second seeks to establish a human and real relationship.339 In other words, the former is manifested in the exaltation of the designer disguising the subjective choices in the process through rationalization; and, the second reveals the authenticity of the subject’s creative action, forming a real dialogue between the architect, project and client.

On the other hand, her advocation for authenticity is also related to the lexicon of Rivolta Femminile. Her sister Carla Lonzi conceptualized authenticity as the “boundless exploration of women’s innermost desires and needs” and said “feminism starts when a woman searches for resonance of herself in the authenticity of another women.”340 In a similar vein, Marta Lonzi indicates that “[t]he primary passion of a woman is for a real relationship with a person; she cannot, therefore, feel attracted and get satisfied by a symbolic relationship with a thing…”341 which might clarify further her disappointments within collaboration with male architects at the beginning of her career, as discussed previously in this chapter.

She represents these two poles by two figures; Le Corbusier as the personification of the sublimated creative process and Francesco Borromini as that of the authentic. Although it is not a coincidence that she uses these two outstanding architects almost as iconic symbols for the modern and the historical city in a discussion which she

339 Romanelli and Lonzi, 137. 340 Bracke, 2014a, 67. 341 Lonzi, 1982, 193.

141

favors authenticity as the solution to recover cities' current problems, one should not fall into the illusion of considering Marta Lonzi as an advocate of an historicist approach. She rather presents another critique of orthodox modern architecture dwelling upon the crisis the world experienced under modern conditions of an unstable society, of rootedness. She indicates that “the dissociation between the self and the object is the price that the modern architect has paid to celebrate the self as I design, therefore I am.”342 The last part of this quotation is again an obvious reference to the modern architects’ Cartesian self with a specific reference to Descartes’ well-known maxim that “I think therefore I am.”

If you have established contacts […] with real necessities of people, you will have accumulated a store of human wealth that could be deployed to design houses, estates […] On the other hand, a sublimated process leads you to eliminate this dimension and to replace it with arrogant traces, with little expedients and contrivances, where the humanity cannot be recognized. This is the real failing of modern architecture.343

According to Lonzi, the main principle of architects is to build houses for human to dwell willingly.344 The architect besides new houses, mostly villas, also renovated several houses like in the case of Carla Accardi’s house. One such example, is the renovation of a house situated in the building Piazzale delle Belle Arti, right by the Tiber River. The house in question is located in the attic floor with a large terrace renovation of which was carried out by Lonzi between 1970 and 1972. In my opinion this project must have caused much enthusiasm for the architect as the building itself was already alien to the canons of modern architecture, which was designed by the architect Giulio Gra and constructed in 1930-32 in reference to Baroque architecture.345 Considering Marta Lonzi’s praisal of Borromini, along with the

342 Lonzi, 2006, 149 as cited in Poletti, 1118. 343 Romanelli and Lonzi, 138. 344 Lonzi, 2006, 9. 345 The architect Giulio Gra was assigned by the cooperative La Casa famigliare, in 1928 and the building was constructed in 1930-32. Retrieved from http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giulio- gra_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ [Accessed: 15.06.2019].

142

resemblance of her forms to Baroque, this renovation project signifies her desire to fall outside the canons in concrete terms.

Figure 5.27 Photograph taken from the terrace of the house.

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

Figure 5.28 The exterior view of the attic house, 1930-1932.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 47.

Figure 5.29 Photograph of the original plan of the attic floor.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 47.

Through eliminating some partitions, Lonzi created a large living room visually connected to the kitchen through the glazed partition with curved surface and wooden frame of which transparency, besides its geometry in opposition to the perimeter wall,

143

also emphasizes the concave/convex geometry of the building. Even though this transparent surface is an element that Lonzi often used in her designs, its use in this context implies an explicit gesture to Gra’s original configuration, thus cannot be interpreted as a mere stylistic choice of the architect rather addresses it.346

Figure 5.30 Marta Lonzi’s plan of the attic floor.

Figure 5.31 Section drawing of Marta Lonzi’s renovation project, 1970-1972.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 49.

346 Uncategorized publication fround in Marta Lonzi Archive, M.B., “Il Superattico Fuori di Sé.”

144

Figure 5.32 An interior view of the project, 1970-1972.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 49.

Figure 5.33 Film still from La Terrazza, directed by Ettore Scala, 1980.

145

Figure 5.34 The view taken from the dining area demonstrating also the front door (in front) towards the kitchen (on the left side).

Source: Courtesy of Marta Lonzi Archive.

Figure 5.35 Film stills from Viola directed by Donatella Maiorca, 1998.

146

Even though the notion of dwelling is not central in her critique of modern architects, it was indeed a key to her architectural works. Moreover, since it reveals interesting discussions on modern architecture with arguments on sublimation and authenticity, it might be useful to throw a glance at the tension between dwelling and modernity. Hilde Heynen demonstrates clearly that the dilemma of modern architecture is epitomized the most in the notion of dwelling and its incompatibility with modernity since dwelling is “in the first instance associated with tradition, security, and harmony, with a life situation that guarantees connectedness and meaningfulness” which has been largely considered impossible to achieve under modern conditions. Lonzi’s position embraces a similar logic, though conceptualized without a comprehensive presentation of the conditions of modernity but rather through exalted attitudes of modern architects. In this regard she indicates that:

To sublimate, you don't need either a client, who indeed becomes a hindrance, an embarrassment to be eliminated, or an existing place, which is only a restraint to prevent you from designing. Starting, instead, from the opposite principle, […] the relation I look for with territory is analogous to the kind of relationship I want to establish with the client. I try to discover the secret of a territory, and so also to discover the secret of a person.347

The fundamental of this passage is her emphasis on the loss of connection between the architect and the client, and the pre-existing environment and new ideas; namely the relationship with the world. It is interesting to note that, how distinctly and almost as two opposite poles, yet with almost similar words Heynen puts forwards Massimo Cacciari’s criticism of Martin Heidegger’s Building, Dwelling, Thinking in discussing the possibility of the poetical dwelling:348

As a result of the reduction of the relationship between man and world, as a result of the forgetfulness of being, poetical dwelling has become impossible, and therefore poetic architecture has also become impossible. Real dwelling no longer exists, and authentic building has also disappeared. […] Only an architecture that reflects the impossibility of dwelling can

347 Romanelli and Lonzi, 137. 348 On the subject, see also Hilde Heynen and T. W. Adorno “Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory"” Assemblage, No. 17 (Apr., 1992), pp. 78-91

147

still lay claim to any form of authenticity. Sublime uselessness is the highest that architecture can attain in these circumstances.349

Authenticity from this perspective is directly linked to the exposure of the uselessness and impossibility of dwelling, thus affirms the desire for rootedness as the essential characteristics of the life in the metropolis in its strictest manner. However, Lonzi claims that modern architects operate within a dimension of false consciousness thus forming a sublimated relationship with the object justified by a rationalization outside the self. She denounces that, in doing so “the image of a subject with almost divine powers” emerges.350 Satisfied by this divine image of the self, the architect does not redeem the authenticity in their design intuition, puts aside the process of his creative act and aims at the perception that he creates “out of nothing and in one sweep.”351

She presents the expressions of Le Corbusier describing his design of the Ronchamp Chapel as exemplary. He explains his design within three phases: the first one is to get integrated into the place; the second is the spontaneous birth (after the incubation period) of the work in its totality, at once, with one stroke; and the last one is the slow execution of the drawings, the general design, the plans and the construction itself.352 Based on this definition of the project through a set of rational and deductive reasoning, Lonzi interprets that the architect pays an effort to conceal the fact that he had designed the object beforehand, reconstructed a posteriori, thus sublimated the project.353

The sublimation of the design process through rationalization that she criticizes could even be more evident in this passage of Le Corbusier: “All will be coherent. Lyricism, the poetic phenomenon, is released by disinterested invention, through the brilliance

349 Heynen, 1999, p.20 350 Lonzi, 2006, 31. 351 Ibid., 33. 352 Ibid., 19. 353 Ibid.

148

of relationships, all things being based on the faultless mathematics of combination [of Modulor].”354 In fact, Le Corbusier, particularly his essay “Art Libre” providing the architect’s own explanation of Ronchamp, has been criticized for “its absence of semantic clarity” since the key concepts are not defined but remained as theoretical grounds with no support to perceive them proceeded in reality upon a given site.355

Figure 5.36 The first sketches of the Chapel at Ronchamp.

Source: Richard Stockton Dunlap, “Reassessing Ronchamp: the historical context, architectural discourse and design development of Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre Dame-du-Haut” (PhD diss., The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014), 536.

Needless to say, such a story of the creative process of a building checks almost all the boxes Lonzi set forth as the characteristics of the sublimated relationship. According to Lonzi in Le Corbusier’s explanations of the design process of Ronchapm “everything is implicit, deliberately numinous and the process is highly mythologized, suitable for a precise exaltation and realization of the self through the work: identification in the creative god, in the design genius.356

In comparison with the mindset of modern architects, she feels much closer to the way Francesco Borromini, the prominent Italian architect of the 17th century, relates himself with the project due to his natural way of expressing each step of his creative

354 Cited in Richard Stockton Dunlap, “Reassessing Ronchamp: the historical context, architectural discourse and design development of Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre Dame-du-Haut” (PhD diss., The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014), 144. 355 Dunlap, 148. 356 Lonzi, 2006, 22.

149

action and thus his awareness of the responsibility of all his decisions originating from his own thoughts which Lonzi finds quite liberating.357 To clarify her point, she gives the example of Opus Architectonicum, the book consisting of Borromini’s work written by Francesco Spada with the help of the architect. The focus of her attention is the authentic way Borromini expresses his design for the Oratorio dei Filippini (Oratory of Saint Philip Neri) presenting the real relationship the architect formed between himself, the client, and the built environment. Before going into particulars of Lonzi’s interpretation, some fundamentals are ought to be presented about Borromini’s commission to the project.

By the time Borromini was commissioned as the architect to the Oratory, the Oratorians had already have an architect, Paolo Maruscelli who had already designed an entire complex for them. Dissatisfied by some details of the design like the positioning of the building or the order of the windows, Borromini, a young architect, came to the scene assigned as the assistant to Maruscelli, to elaborate on more convenient solutions. Even though Borromini’s strong presence and ambition during the process proposing significant alterations in the project led the principal architect to resign his position, it should also be noted that Borromini did not start it from scratch thus started to some extent from where Maruscelli left.358

The aim to remind this story is to be aware that the creative process operated at different levels by different architects yet strictly intertwined with each other which should be taken into account when analyzing Lonzi’s praise of Borromini as it might be more complicated to determine the exact role played by him. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that he expressed extensively the motivation behind his design originated from his subjective intuitions as well as the restraints given to him by Oratorians as preconditions.

357 Ibid., 11. 358 Jake Morrissey, The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome, (HarperCollins e-books: 2006), 123-126.

150

For instance, Lonzi is impressed by the solution he found for the design of the façade on which Borromini was asked to overcome two main challenges. That the façade of the Oratory should not compete with that of the Church adjacent to it; and, the said façade should remain free of ornaments for the same reason. He expresses his solution as such:

In giving form to said façade I created the figure of the human body with open arms as if it embraces everyone who enters; and this open-armed figure is divided in five parts, that is, the chest in the center, and the arm, each in two sections [arm and forearm] as they open out.359

Borromini’s explanations address the proportions of the human body as in the case of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp and the Modular, yet Lonzi makes the differentiation between the two based on their justification of the projects. For instance, while Borromini indicates that “in shaping this facade I figured out the human body with open arms, as if it embraces everyone who enters,” thus reveals his subjective preference; Le Corbusier relies on mathematics and rationalization through his introduction of Modulor. According to Lonzi, Borromini’s attitude consists of subjective design choice, and is an outcome of a real relationship with the client and sensitive to the constraints imposed by the alignments of the existing context. When he says that

I beg whoever should read these sayings of mine to reflect that I have had to serve a Congregation of souls so restrained that they have stayed my hands from applying ornament, and consequently in many places it has behooved me to obey their will rather than art.360 he runs the risk which rationalization does not take because his authenticity relies on his claim of subjectivity which is not supported by canons whereas rationalization allows architects “to detach from himself, and from any context.”361 Within this regard, Marta Lonzi argues that she accepts the risks and seeks for her rights of subjectivity in the creative process.

359 Ibid., 132. 360 Ibid., 131. 361 Lonzi, 2006, 19.

151

5.2.2. Female Subjectivity in the Creative Process

In her books as well as in published articles, interviews, and the lectures given at foreign universities and events Marta Lonzi persistently asked the question “what is it for a woman to create”362 yet she scrutinized the subject along with the matter of “real” or sublimated relationship established with the object. This intertwined characteristic of the two analysis shows that her perspective is rooted in the creative process rather than proposing that there is a female way of designing to which she is strictly opposed as seen in her own words:

I always disapprove when I hear someone talking about “female architecture” because I do not think there is such a thing as female architecture, but rather different kinds of female consciousness that make architecture, just as I do not believe there is such a thing as male architecture, but rather different kinds of male consciousness that make architecture. That is to say, the object is the result of a creative process and it is there –in the process– that the difference should be sought.363

However, it should also be noted that as different kinds of female consciousness depending considerably on the life experiences of individuals, thus their position in society and relation to the culture which differ considerably between those of men and women, the gender difference in her experience as a practicing architect has an impact upon creative process at twofold levels. The first one is related to her own consciousness, thus relation with the world as a woman, moreover as a mother. The maternity which at first caused a contradiction for her as it imposed a division between the two aspects of her life namely her career and family, in this instance, directly affected her creative process:

I feel that my creative process is different than that followed by a man, because his investment is different. It is a difference linked to maternity. As a woman, my culture being built on real

362 The second chapter of her book Autenticità e Progetto also has the same title ‘Che cosa è per una donna’ creare meaning ‘What is it for a woman to create.’ 363 Marta Lonzi, “Une femme architecte: Sa propre démarche créative,” Pignon sur la rue 49 (1983), 24–25 as cited in Poletti, 1115.

152

relations with a human being, a little boy or girl, I know I cannot be satisfied to throw all my passion into a relationship with an object.364

The second one is about whether she encounters a woman or a man as her client and the influence lies in the way they communicate with the architect which Lonzi elaborates as such:

The man maintains a more abstract relation with it, the woman a more concrete one. Thus, for example the man interprets you more as the architect in his role and therefore delegates a lot, whereas the woman is capable of occupying “all the space she is given.”365

It is obvious that what is at the center is the real, non-sublimated relationship which prioritizes human dimension over abstraction which she states already found in the way Francesco Borromini designed and explained his project. While this was indeed inevitable for Lonzi as she already values Renaissance and Barouque architects over modern ones in this regard, she also finds possible counter positions from the 20th century in two European women of the 1920s and 1930s: the French designer and architect Eileen Gray and the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. The affinity is based on her observation that the way they conceived progress for humanity “has nothing to do with the totalizing abstraction that underlie the projects and writings of Le Corbusier and the Modern Movement” but rather deriving from a culture that belongs to her and is her friend.366

In her analysis of these two women she focuses more on Eileen Gray, probably attracted to her confrontation with and criticism of Le Corbusier at a personal level, yet mostly as she considers her architecture “never abstract and sublimated.”367 Gray directly opposing to Le Corbusier’s renowned maxim that “a house is a machine for living” indicates that:

364 Romanelli and Lonzi, 138. 365 Ibid. 366 Lonzi, 2006, 60. 367 Ibid., 51.

153

[a] house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its entire organization, all the terms of the work, combine to render it human in the most profound sense.368

Figure 5.37 E.1027, the villa designed by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici.

Source: Caroline Constant, “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, n. 3 (Sep., 1994), 266.

Lonzi also defines the meaning of the house in a similar way: “[t]he house has been and [still] is for me the space in which people live the most intense moments, the physical shell of their spirituality.”369 Besides, just like Gray’s argument that “[f]ormulas are nothing, life is everything,”370 Lonzi searches for a way to eliminate dehumanizing characteristics of abstraction, outside the formulaic characteristics of modern movement. Accordingly, the French architect symbolizes for Marta Lonzi the sense of eternity of the search for the meaning of life since she finds Borromini’s

368 Peter Adam, Eileen Gray (see n. 1), 309 as cited in Caroline Constant, “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, n. 3 (Sep., 1994), 277. 369 Lonzi, 1982, 3. 370 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, "De l'Eclecticisme au Doute," L'Architecture Vivante (Winter 1929): 19 as cited in Caroline Constant, 269.

154

attention to life remained intact, eleven generations later, in Eileen Gray, though obviously in different methods. While “the former has translated it into a majestic work talking baroque, the latter has interpreted it in a modern language, simple and accessible to everyone.”371

Figure 5.38a, b Exterior views of the Villa in Elba Island, Marta Lonzi, 1969-70.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 33-37.

Figure 5.39a, b Interior views of the Villa in Elba Island, Marta Lonzi, 1969-70.

Source: Marta Lonzi. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile: Milano, 1982), 34-35.

As for Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Lonzi recognizes again a harmony between the object and designer referring to the architect’s famous Frankfurt Kitchen which she

371 Lonzi, 2006, 54.

155

designed in the late 1920s. Lonzi appreciates the architect questioning the optimism attributed to the technological developments of the second half of the 1920s by emphasizing the importance to know for whom any project is realized and who benefits from it rather than blindly celebrating the new means modern technology provided.372 On the other hand, even if Marta Lonzi prefers to focus on Lihozky’s justification of her design based on her experience in an apartment with a kitchen of this kind, thus focuses on the personal relationship,373 what is even more intriguing about the project, from a feminist perspective, could be the fact that the German architect Ernst May’s promotion of it as “designed by a woman for women” even though Lihoztky indicates that she had never “run a household before designing the Frankfurt Kitchen […] had never cooked, and had no idea about cooking.”374 Moreover, Lihozky’s prospective vision for women’s lives played a substantial role leading her to rationalize the housework as she “was convinced that women’s struggle for economic independence and personal development [which] meant that the rationalization of housework was an absolute necessity.”375

It is seen by now that throughout her career starting from her university years both as a student and an assistant, enriched by her experiences as a practicing architect, and a feminist; Marta Lonzi meticulously elaborated on the creative process of architects. She saliently believed in the potential of authenticity of the process for a change in the cultural canons which she refused as they were; in a real relationship with the self besides the architectural object as opposed to a sublimated one that she considered suitable for a totalizing male ego.376

372 Ibid., 60. 373 Ibid., 61. 374 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Juliet Kinchin, “Passages from Why I Became an Architect,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, n. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), 95. 375 Ibid. 376 Lonzi, 2006, 62.

156

CHAPTER 6

6. CONCLUSION

Twenty years ago, I was a university student Fifteen years ago, I was a Bachelor of Arts Ten years ago, I was an art writer and friend of artists Two years ago, I was a feminist… Now I am nothing, absolutely nothing.377

Italian society underwent significant social and political transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, causing the emergence of social upheavals against the status-quo. In line with different forms of contestations, newly organized feminist groups exposed critical problems with respect to women’s position in society as political and social subjects. Hence, Italy in that period set the ground for utopian visions to come to the front. Within this context, this thesis questions the existence and experience of Italian women and their theoretical and spatial engagements in the fields of art and architecture.

To capture the tensions emerged between feminism, art and architecture in the Italian context of the mid-twentieth-century, the content of this study is narrowed down to one of the most influential Italian feminist collectives of the 1970s, Rivolta Femminile, and its two members: the artists Carla Accardi and the architect Marta Lonzi. The main questions that are posed are “how did the feminist discourse of Rivolta Femminile and the experience of feminism make an impact on the career of both these women?” in other words, “in what ways did they integrate their self-awareness achieved through autocoscienza to their practice and perception of art and architecture?; and, “how could we derive meaning from their original feminist contributions to the practice and discourse of art and architecture of the period?” The common characteristic for both

377 Carla Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), 200.

157

case studies that set the ground for my analyses is both Accardi and Lonzi’s desire to subvert the prevailing social and sexual norms and their search for autonomy with inspiration from the ideals of Rivolta Femminile which is aptly reflected on their praxis of art and architecture.

Therefore, before moving onto the examination of the cases, a general Italian scenery of the 1960s and 1970s is portrayed through the social and political transformation emerged in accordance with the industrialization and modernization of the country; in the next section followed by the reflections of these on society in the forms of successive opposition movements contesting the status-quo. The portrayals of two particular women organizations, AIDIA and Rivolta Femminile, on the other hand, reveals the oppression of Italian women from different perspectives: the former with a focus on the discrimination against women architects within the profession of architecture; and, the latter as it was the organization that binds my case studies, influencing their careers through the critical concepts introduced into the Italian feminist lexicon.

None of the women architects mentioned in the first chapter was a member of AIDIA. Similarly, Marta Lonzi never mentions the association. That is why I cannot indicate why she did not choose to overcome the loneliness she faced within the profession by being a part of an organization dedicated to the solidarity between women architects, nor even if she had known its existence in the first place. However, when comparing the statements of Rivolta Femminile and AIDIA, it becomes clear that the two dealt with the problem of the inferior status of the women from very different perspectives. For an architect who is part of a feminist collective rejecting the equality between sexes, but positing women as the other of men focusing on the sexual difference, it would not be compatible to join an association which practically fought for the affirmation of woman as the counterpart of man by relying on his very existence to facilitate women’s recognition in technical fields. Hence, I would argue that, seemingly radical stance of Rivolta has the potential of making a more considerable influence on the spatial practice and architectural discourse for its theoretical premises.

158

The potential relies on their advocation for the detachment of women from the patriarchal values of Italian society which besides signifying a metaphorical space, required a physical space in which to women achieve their autonomy. Therefore, it is one of the aims of this study to unfold the impacts of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile on women’s spatial practice in a broader sense which is carried out by an inquiry into the practice of separatist spaces promoted by the collective.

The feminists’ need for autonomous spaces manifested itself in the space appropriation of small autocoscienza groups through meetings held occasionally in members’ houses where women could re-discover their identity and express their experiences outside the boundaries of the patriarchal culture. In doing so, through separatism embedded in autocoscienza, Italian feminists attributed new use values to the house, thus enabled women’s creative production to take place. Even though recent studies carried out particularly in the fields of urban sociology managed to shed light on this spatial phenomenon (Vacchelli 2012, 2014), the most striking challenge this thesis faced within the scope of architectural history might have been to reach visual evidences of such practices. On the one hand, the symptomatic tendency of feminisms to be represented in oral forms of communication and histories could account for this lack of visuality. Yet on the other hand, this problematic situation of visual representation does not apply to Rivolta Femminile members due to the contribution of their own publishing house Scritti di Rivolta Femminile in Milan which was founded to circulate feminists’ ideas among other women. In this regard, this thesis benefits from small green booklets published by the collective, compiling several articles of the members, not only for they constitute the foundation stone of Rivolta’s feminist discourse, but also because they provide visual records of their activities. Nevertheless, the visual representation of the publishing house itself which is presented in the third chapter as an exemplary of autonomous feminist landscapes within the urban sphere, remains absent, thus open to further research.

The feminists’ desire to go beyond the constraints of patriarchal culture and live differently, as we have seen, epitomized in the spatial sense through the appropriation

159

of the domestic realm, resonates with the artist Carla Accardi’s habitable environments Tenda, Ambiente Arancio, and Triplice Tende. It is unfolded so far that Rivolta Femminile and Carla Lonzi, in particular, had played an important role in Accardi’s career, which apparently stimulated her reconceptualization of art and artists. The novelty of her works lies in the implications of alternative domesticity, which is interpreted in this study as sites of transformation and possible feminist landscapes. Reaching beyond being artworks to be appreciated from a distance, they invite spectators’ occupation and become a space of everyday life. All environments refer to the content of home, but to one that is mobile, temporary, transparent, and free of possession. I would argue that even exhibitions of these works in different contexts in terms of time and place and sometimes organization reinforces the characteristics of mobility and temporality.

Moreover, Accardi’s references to nomadism and communal life coincide with the general criticism of consumerist society in that period. Accordingly, she was not the only Italian artist who dealt with spatial production, but her works predate them. Since an alternative, anti-consumerist way of living challenging both the infrastructure and superstructure of the contemporary civilization resonate with the politically charged utopian thinking of the 1960s and 1970s, the analysis begins with a portrayal of the habitable art phenomenon promoted by the artists affiliated with Arte Povera. The artists’ interest in the domestic realm is articulated not merely as an aesthetic gesture but as a critique of society. One of the most intriguing discussions on these environments, as elaborated in the last section of Chapter 4, is their possibility of being feminist landscapes. In this regard, her expressions describing the motivations behind her works alters with respect to her participation in Rivolta Femminile. While in the beginning of the 1970s she employs feminist concerns referring to her tents such as “destructible …. in opposition to masculine taste for the immutable,”378 and her constant emphasis on the self-awareness and its effects on her conception of art and herself, her statements towards the 1990s tends to strip away any ideological link in

378 Kittler, 2017, 101.

160

between. Nevertheless, in line with the artist’s permanent expressions, the desire to push people to live differently is situated at the center of her analysis.

Marta Lonzi, on the other hand, reflected on Rivolta’s feminist lexicon through her conceptualizations of architecture. I would argue that although the contents of Marta Lonzi’s texts, based heavily on her personal experiences within the field of architecture, delves into the creative process of architects and attempts to find her own female subjectivity, they remain vague in directing the reader how she integrated the concepts she introduced into her architectural works. Thus, her categorization of architects’ creative process as sublimated and authentic and her privileging of the latter, do not present a clear material ground for investigating the ways within which she practiced her ideas in her spatial productions. Instead, what is seen in her texts is her constant disappointment in architectural canons that she considers limiting the ‘true’ subjectivity of architects by conditioning them to operate under certain rational formulations. In this regard, I would like to point out two main problems concerning Marta Lonzi’s conceptualization of creative process.

The first one is her over-generalizations of modern architecture in the sense that she presents it in a reductive way as a manifestation of certain codifications realized and justified by the mindset of the modern genius. At this point, she makes a clear distinction between men and women insomuch as that she argues women cannot pursue a sublimated creative process because they do not experience the world as men do, that is, women need to establish a direct and real relationship with people, thus a symbolic relationship with an object is not compatible. In line with Rivolta’s awareness of women’s absence as subjects for centuries, she starts with the refusal of dominant culture and develops her criticism around the canons of modernity. However, her effort to overcome the oppression seems to target only at modern architects as patriarchal subjects as if women’s oppression had not been constructed and the male subject had not been mythologized prior to the 20th century. When integrating her refusal into the architectural culture, I believe, she overlooks the fact that the architectures of the past also had their own canons embedded in the production

161

of space. Her valorization of both Renaissance and Baroque architects for their prioritization of human values as exemplified by her admiration of Francesco Borromini, seems to posit them not as male protagonists but architects with a sensibility toward life and world in a gender-neutral way.

Secondly, with respect to Marta Lonzi’s architectural works, her emphasis on the relationship between clients and architects is hard to be proven since, as I mentioned previously, she does not elaborate on her own projects. In fact, the idea that architects should mediate between their creativity and the needs of the client and make references to the pre-existing environment is not an innovative contribution of Marta Lonzi, but rather a discussion in Italian architecture of the mid-twentieth-century. Her feminist contribution to such criticism of orthodox modernism, however, does not seem to adopt a radical attitude in practice. For instance, her housing projects employ principles of fluidity and transparency and make gestures to their context, yet the architect does not offer a radical way of living in a manner that would stand against the predetermined presumptions of domestic realms reinforcing the conventional gender roles imposed on women. As for the manifestation of her creativity, it seems that she gives importance to create her own architectural language. The frequent use of transparent curved surfaces with organic patterns appears almost as her signature which can be seen in many of her projects from the interiors of houses, to the renovated facades of the Urban Park, and even within the organization of the factory in Cagliari. To sum up, how she integrated her critique of architectural canons along with her conceptualization of authenticity in the creative process into her architectural works does not seem apparent. Instead, I argue that Marta Lonzi’s books are clear manifestations of the practice of autocoscienza, which relied on the exchange of women’s self-discoveries and experiences with each other. In this sense, by sharing the disappointments, observations, and criticism of architectural culture, she manifests a feminist authenticity in her theories.

While recapturing the lexicon of Rivolta Femminile and analyzing the distinct ways both the artist Carla Accardi and the architect Marta Lonzi employed in their reaction

162

to the patriarchal culture, I aimed to restate their contribution to the fields of art and architecture, whether or not such a theoretical premise found immediate resonance within their practice. I believe that engagement with the underpinning concepts that Rivolta introduced to Italian feminism for the subversion of the social norms remained at the center of both Accardi’s and Lonzi’s work.

163

REFERENCES

“Gra, Giulio.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 58 (2002), edited by Gianluca Ficorilli. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giulio-gra_(Dizionario- Biografico)/

Accardi, Carla. “Tende turche-Nomadismo.” In Accardi, edited by Ida Gianelli and Carla Accardi, 28. Milan: Charta, 1994.

Accardi, Carla. “Transparency.” Frieze d/e (Summer 2012): 28.

Accardi, Carla. Carla Accardi. Milan: Charta, 1995.

Accardi, Carla. Superiore e Inferiore: Conversazioni fra le ragazzine delle Scuole Medie. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1972.

Agrest, Diana, Leslie Kanes Weisman, and Patricia Conway. The Sex of Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

AIDIA, “Statuto Sociale.” In Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.5 (1957): n.p.

AIDIA. “Fondazione.” In Notizie dall A.I.D.I.A., n.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1956.): n.p.

AIDIA. “La Donna nelle Professioni dell'Ingegneria e dell'Architettura.” In Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.5 (1957): n.p.

AIDIA. “Prime Origini dell'Associazione.” In Notizie dall A.I.D.I.A., n.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1956): n.p.

AIDIA. “Resoconto di un Congresso.” In Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1956): n.p.

AIDIA. Notizie dall'A.I.D.I.A., n.7, 1958.

164

AIDIA. Notizie dall’ A.I.D.I.A., n.20, 1972.

AIDIA. Notizie dall’A.I.D.I.A., Oct. 1961

Almerini, Katia. “Il femminismo di Carla Accardi.” Doppiozero, March 3, 2014. https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/ricordi/il-femminismo-di-carla- accardi?fbclid=IwAR01R33mavdl3D6gZwlngyaoZHRkd6vQoL_ja4qX16Zq Vo9yPXvCZW4pzT4

Ambasz, Emilio, ed. Italy: the new domestic landscape; achievements and problems of Italian design. New York: Museum of Modern Art; Florence: Centro Di, 1972.

Annicchiarico, Silvana. TDM9: W. Women in Italian Design. Milano: Corraini, 2016.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. Storia dell'arte come storia della città, edited by Bruno Contardi. Roma: Editori riuniti, 1983.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and against Capitalism. New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008.

Basilio, Elena. “The translation of American radical feminist literature in Italy. The case of Donne è bello.” PhD Diss., University of Exeter, 2014.

Boccia, Maria Luisa. L’io in rivolta. Vissuto e pensiero di Carla Lonzi. Milan: La Tartaruga Edizioni, 1998.

Boeri, Stefano. La città scritta: Carlo Aymonino, Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo Rossi, Bernardo Secchi, Giancarlo De Carlo. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016

Boetti, Anne Marie. “Lo specchio ardente.” Data, no. 18 (September–October, 1975): 50-55.

165

Bono, Paola and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Bottinelli, Silvia. “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s.” Art Journal 74, no.2 (2015): 62-80.

Bracke, Maud Anne. Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968-1983. New York: Routledge, 2014a.

Bracke, Maud Anne. “Between the Transnational and the Local: mapping the trajectories and contexts of the Wages for Housework campaign in 1970s Italian feminism.” In Reconsidering Women's History: Twenty years of the Women's History Network, edited by Lucy Bland, Katharina Rowold, 105- 122. London: Routledge, 2014b.

Castagnoli, Pier Giovanni. Mario Merz. Torino: Fondazione Merz, 2006.

Celant, Germano, ed. Arte Povera - Im Spazio. Genoa: Edizioni Masnata/ Trentalance, 1967.

Celant, Germano. Mario Merz. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Milan: Electa, 1989.

Cherubini, Laura. “Accardi/Pivi.” Flashart, July 27, 2015. https://flash--- art.it/article/accardi-pivi/?fbclid=IwAR3Gl_jUh4jJzfVEtoG6p0GR1p1x1f- hDUFZeOFCwhKM9ggXd0slg93yl3A,

Coleman, Debra, Elizabeth Danze, Carol Henderson. Architecture and Feminism: Yale Publications on architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.

Colomina, Beatriz and Jennifer Bloomer, ed. Sexuality & Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. Constant, Caroline. “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 3 (Sep., 1994): 265-79.

166

Cozzi, Leslie. “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory21, n.1 (2011): 67-88.

Cullinan, Nicholas. “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera.” October 124, Postwar Italian Art (Spring, 2008): 8-30.

De Radkowski, Georges-Hubert. “Nous les nomades?” In Anthropologie de l’habiter: Vers le nomadisme, edited by Augustine Berque and Michel Deguy, 149-58. Venôme: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “1227: Treatise on Nomadology— The War Machine.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, 351–423. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Dellapiana, Elena and Annalisa B. Pesando, “In front of and behind the Mirror: Women in Italian Radical Design.” In Proceedings of the 3rd MoMoWo International Conference, Workshop, edited by Ana María Fernández García, Helena Seražin, Caterina Franchini and Emilia Garda, 93-106. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018.

Didero, Maria Cristina. “Radical Design Never Existed.” In Radical Utopias: Archizoom, Remo Buti, 9999, Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, UFO, Zziggurat, edited by Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena and Alberto Salvadori, 61-78. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017.

Dunlap, Richard Stockton. “Reassessing Ronchamp: the historical context, architectural discourse and design development of Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre Dame-du-Haut.” PhD diss., The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014.

Ebert, Teresa L. “Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic.” JAC 23, no. 3 (2003): 553–562.

Eco, Umberto. “Does Counter-Culture Exist?” In Apocalypse Postponed: Umberto Eco, edited by Robert Lumley, 115-28. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

167

Eco, Umberto. “Phenomena of This Sort Must Also be Included in Any Panorama of Italian Design.” In Apocalypse Postponed: Umberto Eco, edited by Robert Lumley, 185-95. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Ergas, Yasmine. “1968-79. Feminism and the Italian Party System: Women's Politics in a Decade of Turmoil.” Comparative Politics 14, no. 3 (Apr., 1982): 253-79.

Fernandez Garcia, Ana Maria, Caterina Franchini, Emilia Garda, and Helena Serazin, ed. MoMoWo. 100 Works in 100 Years: European Women in Architecture and Design. 1918-2018. Turin: Agit Mariogros, Beinasco, 2016.

Germano Celant, "Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia," Flash Art 5 (November/December, 1967), 3. https://flash---art.com/article/arte-povera/

Gianelli, Ida and Carla Accardi, ed. Accardi. Milan: Charta, 1994.

Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. London: Pinguin Books, 1990.

Gómez Gutiérrez, Juan José. “The Politics of Abstract Art: Forma 1 and the Italian Communist Party, 1947-1951.” Cercles. Revista d’Història Cultural 15 (2012): 111-35.

Gray, Eileen and Jean Badovici. "De l'Eclecticisme au Doute." L'Architecture Vivante (Winter 1929): 19.

Gregotti, Vittorio. New Directions in Italian Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1968.

Guccione, Margherita. “Cini Boeri: Design is a Joy but also a Commitment.” Domus, 9 May. 2012. https://www.domusweb.it/en/interviews/2012/05/09/cini-boeri- designing-is-a-joy-but-also-acommitment.html

Hayes Williams, Lisa. “Nomadologies: Itinerant Objects and the Italian 1960s.” interventionsjournals 1, no.3: In and Out of the White Cube, May 21, 2012. https://interventionsjournal.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/nomadologies-

168

itinerant-objects-and-the-italian- 1960s/?fbclid=IwAR06qpiefmOGUg7kkU5v9SS3u-BTVKHq6tGzsJR1rM- 9_m-hMLS6rl5g1rY#_ftnref

Heynen, Hilde and T. W. Adorno. “Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory"” Assemblage, no. 17 (Apr., 1992): 78-91.

Heynen, Hilde. “Modernity and domesticity: Tensions and contradictions.” In Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture, edited by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, 1-30. London, New York: Routledge, 2005.

Heynen, Hilde. Architecture and Modernity: a critique. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Iamurri, Laura. “Una cosa ovvia. Carla accardi, Tenda, 1965-66.” L’uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità, no.3 (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2016): 150-165.

Kittler, Teresa. “Living Art and the Art of Living: Remaking Home in Italy in the 1960s.” Ph.D. diss., University College London, 2014.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Lentini, Amelia ed. AIDIA 60. Milan: Edizioni d'Este, 2017.

Lonzi, Carla and Carla Accardi. “Discorsi.” Marcatre 23, no.5 (June 1966): 195.

Lonzi, Carla, ed. Sputiamo su Hegel: La Donna Clitoridea e la Donna Vaginale. Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974.

Lonzi, Carla. Autoritratto. Milan: et al edizioni, 2010.

Lonzi, Carla. Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978.

169

Lonzi, Marta. “Diritti della mia soggettività.” In La Presenza dell’Uomo nel Femminismo, 11-44. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978.

Lonzi, Marta. “Une femme architecte: Sa propre démarche créative,” Pignon sur la rue 49 (1983): 24–25.

Lonzi, Marta. Autenticità e Progetto. Milan: Jaca Book, 2006.

Lonzi, Marta. In Il labirinto, edited by Comune di Bologna; Assesorato alla Progettazione e Attuazione, 308-311. Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1985.

Lonzi, Marta. L’Architetto Fuori di Sé. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1982.

Lubow, Arthur. “The Renaissance of Marisa Merz, Carol Rama, and Carla Accardi: Three Italian Women Artists Having a Moment.” WMagazine, Feb. 10, 2017. www.wmagazine.com (W)

Lumley, Robert. “Habitable Art: In and Around Piero Gilardi.” https://cms.nottinghamcontemporary.org/site/assets/files/1918/habitable_art- 1.pdf

Lumley, Robert. Statesof Emergency: Cultures of Revoltin Italyfrom 1968 to1978. London: Verso, 1990.

M.B. “Il Superattico Fuori di Sé.” Uncategorized publication fround in Marta Lonzi Archive. Malagreca, Miguel. “Lottiamo Ancora: Reviewing One Hundred and Fifty Years of Italian Feminism.” Journal of International Women's Studies 7, no.4 (2006): 69-89.

McLeod, Mary. “Perriand: Reflections of Feminism and Modern Architecture.” Harvard Design Magazine 20 (Spring/Summer, 2004). http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/20/perriand-reflections-on- feminism-and-modern-architecture.

170

Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Sexual difference. A theory of social-symbolic practice. Translated by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Minnucci, Roberta. “‘Impoverishing signs to reduce them to their archetypes.’ An Introduction to Arte Povera.” In Poor Art I Arte Povera Italian Influences British Responses, edited by Roberta Minnucci, Stephen Nelson, Paul Bonaventura, 7-13. London: Estorick Foundation, 2017.

Morris, Penelope. Women in Italy, 1945-1960 an Interdisciplinary Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Morrissey, Jake. The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome. HarperCollins e-books: 2006.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “Carla Accardi, To Dig Deep.” Flash Art 41, n.260 (International Edition, June: 2008). https://flash---art.com/article/carla-accardi/

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “II PCI ai giovani!!” L’Espresso 14, no. 4 (June 16, 1968): 12- 13.

Passerini, Luisa “Gender Relation.” In Italian Cultural Studies an Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, 144-60. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Pellegrino Sutcliffe, Marcella. “Italian Women in the Making: Re-reading the Englishwoman’s Review (c.1871–1889).” In Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento, edited by Nick Carter, 179-203. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Poletti, Raffaella. “The Marta Lonzi Archive: Subjectivity in the Creative Process.” In Women's Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018) Toward a New Perception and Reception, edited by Helena Seražin, Caterina Franchini and Emilia Garda, 1110-1118. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2018.

Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden. Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000.

171

Rivolta Femminile. “Assenza della donna dai momenti celebrativi della manifestazione creativa maschile.” in Sputiamo su Hegel: la donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale, edited by Carla Lonzi, 63-67. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974.

Rivolta Femminile. “Catalogo Casa editrice Rivolta femminile.” October 1978. http://www.herstory.it/rivolta-femminile

Rivolta Femminile. “Significato dell'autocoscienza nei gruppi femministi.” In Sputiamo su Hegel. La Donna Clitoride e la Donna Vaginale, edited by Carla Lonzi, 141-47. Milan:Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974.

Rivolta Femminile. La Presenza dell’uomo nel Femminismo. Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978.

Romanelli, Marco and Marta Lonzi. “Domestic Interiors in Palermo and Turin.” Domus, n.766 (December 1994): 132-139.

Rossi, Catharine. “Existence, Experience and Representation: Women and Design in Post War Italy.” Master's Thesis, University of Brighton, 2006.

Rossi, Catharine. “Furniture, Feminism and the Feminine: Women Designers in Post- war Italy, 1945 to 1970.” Journal of Design History 22, no.3 (2009): 243-57. Sassoon, Donald. Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society, and Politics since 1945 (2nd ed). New York: Longman, 1997.

Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete and Juliet Kinchin. “Passages from Why I Became an Architect” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011): 86-96.

Shapiro, Lisa. “Mind and Body: Descartes’ Mixed Relation to Feminist Thought.” In Descartes and the Modern, edited by Neil Robertson, Gordon McOuat and Tom Vinci, 235–53. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace : Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

172

Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces. Los Angeles, University of Carolina Press, 1992.

Tafuri, Manfredo. “Gruppo Quaroni.” In Il concorso per i nuovi uffici della Camera dei deputati: un bilancio dell'architettura italiana, 90-97. Rome: Edizioni universitarie italiane, 1968.

Tafuri, Manfredo. History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987.

Tarrow, Sidney. Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Turan, Ayşe Belgin. “Production of a Discourse: Italian Neo-Rationalism as Case Study.” PhD diss., Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University, 1995.

Vacchelli, Elena. “Gender and the city: intergenerational spatial practices and women’s collective action in Milan.” 2014. https://journals.openedition.org/cedref/1001?lang=en&fbclid=IwAR0L473bS tNeCib1YaWtlSvxOwiK94ERYiowL67TfrJTu7i2qCuzdl8ulsg

Vacchelli, Elena. “Geographies of subjectivity: locating feminist political subjects in Milan.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18, no. 6 (2011): 768-85.

Vagheggi, Paolo. “In Conversation with Carla Accardi: Life is not art, art is life.” In Carla Accardi, edited by Danilo Eccher, 126-45. Milan: Electa, 2004.

Vallarino, Maurizio. “Luminous marks.” Art and Artists (June 1972): 33.

Vigo, Nanda and Anna Lenz. “With my ideas I was always a bit too early; that was my problem.” In Strong women for art: in conversation with Anna Lenz, edited by Anna Lenz, 206-217. Munich: Hirmer, 2013.

173

Vogel, Carol. “The Aulenti Uproar.” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 22, 1987.

Volpi, Marisa. “Intervista a Carla Accardi.” Marcatre 42, May 1968.

Willson, Perry. Women in Twentieth-century Italy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Wood, Sharon and Joseph Farrell. “Other voices: contesting the status quo.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, 131-150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Zapperi, Giovanna. “Challenging Feminist Art History: Carla Lonzi’s divergent paths.” In Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, edited by Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, 104-24. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.

Zevi, Bruno. “Professioniste fuori di sé,” L’Espresso (April 23, 1982): 188.

174

APPENDICES

A: TURKISH SUMMARY / TÜRKÇE ÖZET

İtalya, yirminci yüzyılın ortalarından itibaren geniş çaplı endüstrileşme ve modernleşme süreçlerinin bir yansıması olarak birbirleriyle kesişen politik, sosyal ve kültürel hareketlerin sonucunda yeni bir döneme girmiş; bu süreçte alışılagelmiş cinsiyet rolleri eleştirilmiş, kadın kimliği egemen sosyal normlara karşı yeniden tanımlanmıştır. Bu tez, bu ortamda, 1970’lerde ortaya çıkan ve İtalyan feminist söylemine katkıda bulunmuş kolektiflerden biri olan Rivolta Femminile’nin, kendi üyesi olan sanatçı Carla Accardi ve mimar Marta Lonzi’nin mekânsal ve kuramsal çalışmaları üzerindeki etkisini inceliyor. Feminizm, sanat ve mimarlık arasındaki gerginliği derinlemesine araştıran çalışmanın merkezinde Carla Accardi’nin alternatif evsellik ve ev yaşamı düşüncelerini yansıtan sanat ürünü mekânları ve Marta Lonzi’nin modern mimarlara ve mimari kanonlara yönelik eleştirisi yer alıyor. Her ne kadar tartışmanın odak noktasını, Accardi ve Lonzi’nin feminist duruşlarının üretimleriyle ilişkili çözümlenmesi oluşturuyor olsa da mimarlık tarihine ve genel olarak İtalya’nın sosyal ve politik hayatına yaptıkları katkıları netleştirmek amacıyla 1960 ve 1970’lerin İtalya’sının genel bir manzarası da çizilmekte.

Bu çalışmanın genel itibariyle yirminci yüzyılın ikinci yarısında İtalyan kadın mimarların az tanınırlığı ve yetersiz temsiliyetleri üzerine birtakım gözlem ve eleştiriden yola çıktığı düşünüldüğünde, özellikle mimar Marta Lonzi’nin bu duruma maruz kaldığı görülür. Bu sebeple, Milan’daki Elvira Badaracco Vakfı’nda son birkaç yıldır düzenlenme aşamasında olan ve bu süreçte ziyaret etme fırsatı bulduğum Marta Lonzi Arşivi Projesi bu tez için özel bir önem taşımaktadır. Carla Accardi’nin alternatif evsellik ve ev hayatı önermeleri taşıyan ve 1965-1972 yılları arasında ürettiği yaşanabilir sanat ortamları; ve Marta Lonzi’nin modern mimarlara ve mimari

175

kanonlara yönelik eleştirisi tartışmanın temel noktasını oluştursa da, bu iki kadının katkılarının mimarlık tarihi ve İtalya’nın genel politik ve sosyal ortamı içerisinde yeniden konumladırılabilmek ve hangi koşullar altında çalıştıklarını anlamak amacıyla 1960 ve 1970’li yıllar İtalya’sının genel bir manzarası da sunulmaktadır.

Dönem İtalyası’nın politik ve sosyal dönüşümlerini inceleyen ikinci bölümde görüldüğü üzere İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası, savaşı kaybeden bir ülke olan İtalya 1950’lerde, endüstrileşmekte olan başka ülkelerin de deneyimlediği gibi, hızlı kentleşme, ekonomik genişleme ve ülke ekonomisinin uluslararası pazarlarda kendine yer edinme çabaları gibi süreçler geçirmiştir. Tarıma dayanan ve gelişmiş bir ülke manzarasından uzakta olan ülke bu on yıl içerisinde sözde “Ekonomik Mucize” yaşamış ve bunun sonucunda 1960’ların başında Avrupa ekonomisinin önde gelen aktörlerinden biri haline gelmiştir. Bu hızlı modernleşme ve sanayileşme süreçleri ve sözde mucize, yönetimde olan Hristiyan Demokrat Parti’nin özel sektörün gelişmesini destekleyici politikaları, yüksek işsizlik oranı, güneyden kuzeye iç göç ve işçi sendikalarının zayıflığı sebepleriyle ucuz iş gücüne bağlı kalmış ve toplumun 1950’lerin başındaki iyimserliğini kaybetmesine neden olmuştur. Bu durumun üstesinden gelmek için Demokrat Parti sol görüşün desteğini alabilmek amacıyla İtalyan Sosyalist Parti ile 1963’te İtalya’nın ilk Merkez Sol Koalisyonu’nu kursa da, problemlerin çözülmesine yönelik reformların yetersizliği sebebiyle toplum üzerindeki ikna ediciliğini yeniden kazanamamıştır. Dolayısıyla, oluşan bu kriz ortamı, özellikle 1960’ların ikinci yarısından itibaren, öğrenci hareketiyle birlikte üniversitelerde başlayan daha sonra fabrikalara ve genel olarak topluma yayılan sistem karşıtı başkaldırı seslerinin yükselmesiyle karşılık bulmuştur. Başka bir deyişle, 1970’lerde, direniş yalnızca işçi hareketi aracılığıyla değil, büyük ölçüde görmezden gelinen birçok politik ve sosyal grubun kendi mücadele biçimlerini geliştirmesiyle devam etmiştir.

176

1970’li yıllar, feminist tarihçi Luisa Passerini’nin de belirttiği gibi İtalya’da toplumsal cinsiyet ilişkilerinin teorik ve tarihsel tanımı için merkezi bir konumdadır.379 Benzer bir şekilde, tarihçi Donald Sassoon, günümüzde İtalyan kadınların toplumsal özne olarak kabul edilmesini 1970’li yıllarda verilen mücadelelere dayandırmaktadır.380 Bu doğrultuda, akademik çalışmalar İtalyan kadın hareketini ve yeni İtalyan feminizmini 1970’ten itibaren başlatma eğilimindedir. Bunu yaparken, dönemin sosyal ve kültürel ayaklanmalarının bir parçası olarak öğrenci ve işçi hareketlerinin ve özellikle Fransız, İngiliz ve Amerikan feminizmlerindeki hakim tartışmaların İtalyan feministler üzerindeki etkileri incelenmektedir. Fakat önceki dönemlerde feminizmin İtalya’da kayda değer bir varlık gösteremediği düşüncesi önceki katkıların ihmal edilmesine neden olmaktadır. Bu nedenle bu tez, boşanma ve kürtaj hakları gibi tartışma ve mücadele konularının köklerinin daha önce de var olduğunu ortaya koymak ve özgün İtalyan özelliklerine ışık tutmak amacıyla erken yirminci yüzyıldaki İtalyan feministlerin de bir tasvirini sunar. Yeni İtalyan feminizmin varlığı ve oluştuğu tarihsel bağlama gelindiğinde, farklı duruşlar sergileyen birçok feminist gruba değinmek yerine feminist söylemin gelişmesine büyük katkıda bulunan 1970’lerde yazılmış feminist manifestolara odaklanarak mevcut tartışmalardaki öne çıkan kavramları merkezine alır.

İtalyan kadın mimarların ve feministlerin deneyimlerini iki kadın organizasyonu üzerinden ele alan üçüncü bölüm, sırasıyla, günümüzde hala aktif olan ve 1957’de mühendislik ve mimarlık alanlarındaki kadınların dayanışması için faaliyete geçen İtalyan Kadın Mühendis ve Mimarlar Derneği’ni ve 1970’te ilk manifestolarının Roma’da dağıtılmasıyla kurulan feminist kolektif Rivolta Femminile’yi detaylı olarak inceler. İtalyan Kadın Mühendis ve Mimarlar Derneği, kadınların teknik alanlardaki çalışmalarında erkek iş arkadaşlarından gördükleri olumsuz ve baskıcı yaklaşımlara vurgu yaparak, bu sorunların üstesinden gelmek için pratik çözümler üretmeyi

379 Luisa Passerini, "Gender Relations," in Italian Cultural Studies an Introduction, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 144. 380 Donald Sassoon, Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society, and Politics since 1945 (2nd ed). (New York: Longman, 1997), 107.

177

amaçlamıştır. Dernek, kuruluş yıllarından başlayarak kendi üyeleri arasında gerçekleştirdikleri ulusal kongreler ve yurtdışındaki benzer organizasyonlarla bir araya geldikleri uluslararası etkinliklerde üniversitelerde ve profesonel yaşamda kadın olmak, işyerlerinde yaşadıkları ayrımcılık, aile ve iş yaşantısı arasındaki uzlaşma yöntemleri ve annelik gibi temel konular üzerine tartışmalar yürütmüştür. Çalışmanın odak noktalarından biri olan mimar Marta Lonzi bu derneğin bir üyesi olmasa da, derneğin aktivitelerinin ve ifadelerinin bir tasviri kadın mimarların karşılaştıkları ayrımcılığı ve genel olarak tarihsel bağlamın anlaşılmasını zenginleştirmek için önemlidir.

Bununla birlikte, Rivolta Femminile, hem Marta Lonzi, hem de Carla Accardi için ortak bir platform sağlaması ve kariyerlerine etki etmesi sebebiyle, bu çalışma için daha önemli bir yere sahiptir. 1970’lerin erken kurulan feminist kolektiflerinden biri olan Rivolta Femminile, 1970’te üç kurucu üyesi; önde gelen bir sanat eleştirmeni ve Marta Lonzi’nin ablası olan Carla Lonzi, sanatçı Carla Accardi ve gazeteci Elvira Banotti tarafından yazılan ilk manifesto itibariyle kadın kimliğinin kadınlar tarafından özfarkındalık ve cinsel farklılık kavramları merkezinde yeniden ele alınmasının gerekliliğini savunmuştur. Dolayısıyla, grup üyeleri kadının erkekle ilişkili bir şekilde tanımlanmasına karşı çıkarak, eşitlik kavramını erkeğin iktidarda kalmasına hizmet eden ideolojik bir aygıt olarak gördükleri için reddeder. Buna ek olarak, kolektif yalnızca kökleşen erkek egemenliğini ve ataerkil kültürü değil Marksizm ve Yeni Sol gibi dönemin devrimci politikalarını da eleştirir. Bu eleştirinin temelinde sol söylemin sınıf mücadelesi adı altında kadın öznesini ve baskılara karşı mücadelelerini gözardı etmesi yatmaktadır. Bu doğrultuda, tartışmaya açık bir şekilde Rivolta Femminile’nin en etkileyici katkısı kadın ve erkeğin birbirini tamamlaması anlayışına zıt olarak bu iki özneyi birbirinin diğeri olarak yeniden tanımlaması olabilir. Kolektif, kadınların kendi kimliklerini özerk bir şekilde yeniden keşfetmeleri ve bu deneyimlerinin birbirleriyle paylaşmaları anlamında kullanılan özfarkındalık (autocoscienza) kavramını kadının özgürlüğüne giden tek yol olarak gösterir.

178

Bu noktada kolektif üyeleri, erkeğin yargısı ve onayından uzak olabilecekleri kendi özerk alanlarını talep etmiştir. Her ne kadar bu alan daha çok tarihsel, psikolojik ve zihinsel bir anlam taşısa da, kadınların yoksun bırakıldığı fiziksel bir mekanın da var olduğu kabul edilmiştir. Dolayısıyla, femisint kadınlar mekanı yeniden sahiplenip kendilerine mal etmeye evden başlayarak küçük özfarkındalık gruplarının toplantılarını üyelerin evlerinde gerçekleştirmeye başlamıştır. Diğer bir deyişle Rivolta’nın üyeleri domestik mekana yeni kullanım değerleri atfederek, eve atfedilen geleneksel sınırları zorlamış ve politik olanın domestik mekana nüfuz etmesini sağlamıştır. Bu ayrılıkçı mekan pratiğiyle kadınların yaratıcı faaliyetlerinin ataerkil değerler dışında gerçekleştirmesi amaçlanmıştır. Ev ortamında başlayan mekanı yeniden sahiplenme uygulaması kent ölçeğinde yalnızca kadınlara atfedilen kütüphane, yayınevi, kitabevi gibi mekanların kurulmasıyla devam etmiştir. Böylece, feminist kadınlar kamusal ve özel, içeri ve dışarı gibi ikilemleri sorgulamaktadır. Rivolta Femminile özeline gelindiğinde bu tip bir kentsel mekan “Rivolta Femminile’nin Yazıları” anlamına gelen ve kadınların özerk yazma aktivitelerinin ve bu metinlerin kendi aralarında yayılmasının öncülüğünü yapan grubun kendi yayınevi Scritti di Rivolta Femminile’yi Milan’da kurmasıyla elde edilmiştir.

Bu noktaya kadar bu çalışma, feministlerin evi yeniden kullanımlarına yönelik uygulamalarına öncelik verilmiş olsa da çağdaş koşullara uygun domestik mekân ve ev hayatı eleştirileri 1960’lı yıllarda İtalyan sanatçılar ve mimarlar arasında yaygın bir tartışma konusuydu. Dönemin sosyal ve politik ortamına paralel bir şekilde, ortaya atılan ütopik öneriler toplumun mevcut durumuna meydan okumaktaydı. Bu bağlamda, Rivolta Femminile'nin önde gelen bir üyesi olan tanınmış İtalyan kadın sanatçı Carla Accardi'nin 1965 ve 1972 yılları arasında ürettiği yaşanabilir sanat ortamları başka bir yaşam biçimini tasvir eder. Tenda (Çadır, 1965-66), Ambiente Arancio (Turuncu Ortam, 1966-68), ve Triplice Tenda (Üçlü Çadır, 1969-71) adlı bu ortamlar taşıdıkları feminist anlamlarla Rivolta Femminile’nin Accardi’nin üretimi üzerindeki yansımalarını incelemeyi mümkün kılar. Aynı zamanda bu mekanlar o yıllarda İtalyan mimar ve sanatçılar arasında yaygın olan tüketim karşıtı önerilerle de örtüşmektedir.

179

Dördüncü bölümde sanatçının bu sanat üretimleri üç temel bakış açısıyla yeniden okunmaktadır. Bunlardan ilki Accardi’nin ortamlarının İtalyan sanat grubu, Türkçe “Yoksul Sanat” anlamına gelen, Arte Povera’nın yaşanabilir sanat olgusuyla benzerliklerine odaklanır; ikincisi göçebe yaşam tarzının ifadelerini inceler; ve son olarak, bu üç ortamın feminist mekanlar olma ihtimallerini sorgular. Fakat bu analize başlamadan önce, Carla Accardi’nin sanat eleştirmeni ve Rivolta Femminile’nin en önde gelen üyelerinden Carla Lonzi ile 1965’te tanışmasının ardından başlayan derin dostluğunu ve kolektif kurulmadan önce dahi feminizm ve sanat hakkında yaptıkları tartışmaları hatırlatmak faydalı olabilir. Sanatçının, Carla Lonzi ile ilişkisinin ikilinin yıllar içerisinde sanat üretimlerinin ataerkil değerlerden uzak gerçekleştirilebilmesine ilişkin edindikleri farklı tutumlar sebebiyle bozulması ve dolayısıyla Accardi’nin Rivolta ile bağlarını 1973’te koparması da eşit derecede öneme sahiptir.

Analiz, Accardi’nin ürettiği mekanları dönemin sanatsal ortamında konumlandırmak için, politik bir sanat akımına dönüşen Arte Povera’nın yaşanabilir sanat olgusuyla başlar. Bu akım, sanat tarihçisi ve eleştirmeni Germano Celant tarafından, tüketimciliğe ve emperyalizme karşı sanatçıların yürüttüğü metaforik bir gerilla savaşı olarak kavramsallaştırılmıştır. Bu şekilde, Arte Povera, objelerin arketiplerinden ilham alarak işaretleri yoksullaştıran, kapitalist sistemin sanatçılar üzerinde hegemonik bir güce sahip olmadığı yeni bir sanat türüne yönelik bir arayış şeklinde tanımlanabilir. Benzer şekilde Accardi, “çıkarma” eylemini kendi sanatının olgunluğunun bir göstergesi olarak yorumlamış; geçici ve taşınabilir sanat ortamlarının uygarlığın üst yapılarından uzak, özgür bir yaşamı temsil ettiğini ifade etmiştir. Sanatçının bu çalışmalarının Arte Povera sanatçılarına ve özellikle Mario Merz’e ilham kaynağı olduğu düşünülmektedir. Celant’ın savunduğu, mevcut sistemi kendisine düşman olarak gören bu metaforik savaşın Accardi’nin durumunda, alternarif bir yaşam biçimi vurgusuyla ataerkil topluma karşı verildiği söylenebilir.

Bu dönemde, domestik mekanlar etrafında yoğunlaşan bir diğer önemli tartışma konusu olan göçebelik, modern öznelerin hareketsiz ve yerleşik bir yaşam tarzından uzaklaşmalarına odaklanır ve geçici yaşam ortamlarınının uygunluğunu analiz eder.

180

Bu anlamda, çadırların doğal olarak uyandırdığı göçebelik çağrışımlarının yanı sıra, Accardi’nin kendi ortamlarını üretirken Carla Lonzi’nin kendisine gösterdiği bir ortaçağ Türk çadırından etkilendiğini belirtmesi, göçebelik kavramını bu tez için önemli bir hale getirir. Benzer şekilde, 1980’de yazdığı “Tende Turche-Nomadismo” (Türk Çadırları-Göçebelik) adlı kısa metin, sanatçının göçebe bir yaşam tarzına olan ilgisini kanıtlar niteliktedir. Kuramsal bir bakış açısıyla bakıldığında görülen hem Carla Accardi’nin hem Arte Povera sanatçılarının çalışmalarındaki hakim sistemin ve onun dayattığı kültürel rejimin güç dengelerini bozma çabası sebebiyle Gilles Deleuze ve Félix Guattari’nin “War Machine” başlıklı metinlerinde kavramsallaştırdıkları “savaş makinesi” ile benzerlikleri de analiz edilmiştir. Buna ek olarak, sanatçının 1970’lerdeki hem farklı form ve boyutlarda ve yapılaşmamış bir peyzaja yerleştirdiği çadırlardan oluşan adsız çizimi hem de yine benzer bir kompozisyonla sergilenen çadır maketleri, Accardi’nin ikonik sanat objeleri üretmek yerine, kapitalist üretimden uzak, ilkel topluluklara atıfta bulunan bir toplu yaşam biçimini tasvir ettiği fikrini güçlendirmektedir.

Bu bölüm son olarak, sanatçının yaşanabilir sanat ortamlarını potansiyel feminist mekanlar olarak ele alarak, Carla Accardi’nin bu dönemdeki üretimleri hakkında geçmişe yönelik yaptığı açıklamalarının izlerini sürer. Diğer bir deyişle, sanatçının çalışmalarını nasıl özfarkındalık gibi Rivolta Femminile’nin feminist söylemleriyle ilişkilendirdiğini, ve zaman içerisinde, buna zıt bir şekilde, kendisini ve ürettiği ortamları feminizmle olan ilişkisinden uzak değerlendirdiği analiz edilmiştir. Bu bağlamda, iki önemli zaman aralığının üzerinde durulmaktadır. İlki sanatçının 1970’li yıllardaki açıklamalarını inceler. Bu yıllarda Accardi’nin Rivolta ile bağları kopsa da feminizmle ilişkisi devam etmektedir. Dolayısıyla, geçici, taşınabilir, ve yarı saydam bir malzeme kullanarak inşa ettiği çadırlarını betimlerken çalışmalarının “yok edilebilir” olma özelliklerini eril sanat üretiminin değişmez ve yok edilemeze olan geleneksel ilgisine karşıt bir duruş olarak tasvir eder. Fakar 1990’lara doğru gelindiğinde, sanatçının üretimleri üzerinde herhangi ideolojik bir amacın etkisini reddettiği ve feminist ifadelerden kaçındığı görülmektedir. Kadın mimar olarak adlandırılmak yerine sanatçı denmesini her zaman tercih ettiğini belirtmesi, ve bu

181

durumu kadın olmasının bir tesadüf olarak sanatçı olmasınıysa kendi seçimleri sonucu gerçekleşen bir karar olmasıyla açıklaması bu durumun en açıklayıcı örneklerinden biri olabilir. Yine de Carla Accardi, 1950’lerden itibaren sürdürdüğü soyut ifade tarzının ikonografi yerine tercih etmesinin sebebini kadın olması üzerinden açıklamıştır. Sanatçıya göre, yüzyıllar boyunca erkeklerin zaferlerini ve maceralarını temsil eden ikonografi bir kadın olarak kendisi için uygun değildir.381 Bütün bunlara rağmen, sanatçının ürettiği üç ortam da yalnızca belirli bir mesafeden izlenebilecek sanat nesneleri olmanın ötesine geçerek önerdikleri alternatif yaşam biçimleri ve evsellikleriyle, Rivolta’nın feminist kavramlarıyla de ilişkilendirilebilecek şekilde dönüşüm mekanları olma potansiyeli taşımaktadır.

Beşinci bölüm bu tezin ikinci odak noktası olan ve mekansal ve kuramsal üretimleri tarih yazımında gözardı edilmiş mimar Marta Lonzi’nin modern mimarlara ve mimari kanonlara karşı feminist eleştirisini inceler. Carla Lonzi’nin kardeşi olan Marta, kuruluşundan itibaren Rivolta Femminile’nin etkin bir üyesidir. 1963 yılında, Ludovico Quaroni, Adalberto Libera gibi İtalyan rasyonalist mimarlığının önde gelen isimlerinden eğitim aldığı Floransa Üniversitesi’nden mezun olmuştur. Özellikle daha sonra birtakım yarışma projelerinde beraber çalıştığı ve Roma Üniversitesi’ne asistanlığını yaptığı Quaroni ile ilişkisi kariyeri için önem taşımaktadır. Fakat Marta Lonzi, hem diğer mimarlarla olan ortak tasarım süreçlerini, hem de üniversite eğitimini bir öğrenci ve sonrasında asistan olarak edindiği gözlemlere dayanarak hayal kırıklığı olarak niteler. Bu durumun temelinde sırasıyla 1982 ve 2006 yıllarında yayınlanan L’Architetto Fuori di Sé ve Autenticità e Progetto kitaplarında ayrıntılı olarak incelediği mimarların tasarım süreci yatmaktadır. Mimarlık mesleğinde bulamadığı desteği Rivolta Femminile üyeleri arasında bulduğunu belirten Lonzi, tasarım alanında da işbirliklerine açıktır. 1970 yılında Carla Accardi’yle birlikte tasarladığı lamba ve 1982’deki kitabının kapağını da tasarlayan sanatçı Pietro Consagra ile ortak üretimleri bu duruma örnek olarak gösterilebilir. Buna ek olarak, 1974 yılında Carla Accardi’nin

381 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Carla Accardi, To Dig Deep”, Flash Art (International Edition), vol. 41, no. 260, June 2008. Röportaj dijtal olarak tekrar yayınlanmıştır: https://flash---art.com/article/carla-accardi/

182

Roma’daki evini yeniden tasarlamıştır. Fakat bu tasarım deneyimini, Accardi daha sonra her şeyi kendi tercihlerine göre yeniden yapmak zorunda kaldığını belirterek eleştirir.

Marta Lonzi’nin kanonları reddetmesiyle başlayan mimari eleştirisi temelde modern mimarların rasyonalist ve nesnel olma adı altında soyut formüllere bağlı kalmaları ve bu şekilde müşteri ve tasarım yapılan alanla gerçek bir ilişki kuramamaları görüşüne dayanır. Bu bağlamda, mimari kanonlar mimarların yaratıcılığını kabul görmüş normlar aracılığıyla kısıtlamakla suçlanır. Dolayısıyla Lonzi, kariyeri boyunca, mimarların yaratıcı süreçleri ve ürettikleri nesneyle nasıl bir ilişki kurduklarını inceleyerek bir sınıflandırmaya gider. Bu sınıflandırmanın merkezinde iki farklı tasarım olgusunu vardır. Bunlardan ilki ve Lonzi’nin de savunucusu olduğu özgün tasarım sürecidir. Özgünlükle kastedilen mimar öznesinin çeşitli beklenti ve formüllere bağlı kalmayıp öznelliğini ifade edebilmesi, ve mimar, müşteri ve tasarım objesi arasında gerçek bir diyaloğun kurulabilmesidir. Analizinin ikinci kısmını, yüceltilmiş bir tasarım süreci oluşturur. Lonzi’ye göre bu süreç mimarın tasarım kararlarını üçüncü kişi olarak anlatmasıyla da gözlemlenebilen öznel kararları saklama çabasıdır. Lonzi, özgün süreci Barok mimar Francesco Borromini ile; yüceltilmiş olanıysa modern mimar Le Corbusier ile neredeyse kişileştirir. Analizinde, var olan çevreden bağımsız, kafasında yarattığı modern özneye göre soyut tasarımlar üretmekle suçladığı Le Corbusier’nin Ronchamp Katedrali hakkındaki anlatısına yer vererek, mimarı projeyi daha önce ve tüm bileşenlerden bağımsız bir şekilde tasarladığını saklamaya çalışmakla eleştirir. Diğer yandan Borromini’yi projesinin neredeyse her kararını adım adım anlatması, yapılı çevre ve müşterilerin görüşlerine verdiği özen ve bunun tasarımındaki yansımaları sebebiyle özgün sürecin neredeyse ideal bir figürü olarak tasvir eder.

Bu noktada, Lonzi’nin üzerinde durduğu “bir kadın için tasarlamak ne demektir” sorusu tartışmaya ilginç bir boyut katmaktadır. Mimar, her ne kadar kadınlara veya erkeklere özgü tasarım biçimleri olduğuna inanmadığını dile getirse de kendi tasarım sürecini bir erkeğinkinden farklı gördüğünü belirtir. Bu farklılığı bir kadının annelik

183

deneyimiyle de ilgili olarak, herhangi bir objeyle kurulan ilişkiden tatmin olamayacağı düşüncesiyle savunmaktadır. Bu sebeple, yüceltilmiş bir tasarım sürecini erkek egosuyla ilişkilendirir. Ayrıca, bir diğer ilgi çekici konu, modern mimarlara yönelik eleştirilerine karşı erken yirminci yüzyılın modern olarak tanımlanan iki Avrupalı kadın mimarı; Fransız tasarımcı ve mimar Eileen Gray ve Avusturyalı mimar Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky ile kendisi arasında kurduğu bağdır. Bu benzerlik, Gray ve Lihotzky’nin modern mimarinin soyutlamalarının aksine, kendisinin de ait olduğu bir kültürden esinlenilmesi fikrine dayanır. Bu bağlamda, Marta Lonzi’nin analizi daha çok Gray’e odaklanarak özellikle mimarın Le Corbusier’nin ünlü “ev içinde yaşanılacak bir makinedir” doktrinine karşı çıkmasına vurgu yapar.

Marta Lonzi, kitaplarında oldukça bilinen mimarların projelerinin ve açıklamalarının detaylı bir okumasını yapıp tasarım süreci araştırmasında zemin olarak kullansa da, kendi projelerinin karar verme mekanizmalarına dair açıklamalara yer vermemiştir. Bu nedenle, her ne kadar mimarın arşivi bu çalışma için önemli ve tamamlayıcı materyallere erişilmesini sağlamışsa da, feminist ve özgün bir tasarım sürecini tam olarak kendi mimari üretimlerine nasıl yansıttığı; ve yaratıcılıkla müşterilerin isteklerine gösterdiği hassasiyet arasındaki dengeyi nasıl kurduğu yeni araştırmalara ve yorumlara açıktır. Bu açıdan bakıldığında Lonzi’nin tasarım süreci analizine dair gözlemlenen bir diğer problematik durumsa modern mimari incelemesinin fazla genelleştirilmiş yorumlara dayandırılmasıdır. Buna ek olarak, mimari kanonların, yalnızca modern mimarlık akımına ait olduğu varsayımıyla yola çıkan Lonzi’nin Rönesans ve Barok mimarlıklarına olan övgüsü, dönemlerin kendi kanonlarını görmezden gelir. Benzer şekilde, Le Corbusier ve açıklamaları eril değerlerle birlikte değerlendirilirken, Borromini toplumsal cinsiyet rollerinden bağımsız bir şekilde ele alınmıştır. Bu bakımdan Marta Lonzi, Rivolta’nın cinsiyet rollerinin medeniyetlerin varlığından itibaren inşa edilen baskıcı bir durum olduğuna yönelik vurgusunu mimari eleştirisinde göz ardı etmiş gibi durmaktadır. Her ne kadar özgün bir tasarım sürecini profesyonel bir kadın mimar olarak nasıl uyguladığı tartışmalara açık olsa da, egemen mimari kanonlara karşı duruşu sebebiyle dışlanabileceğinin farkında olan Lonzi’nin

184

görüşlerini başkalarıyla paylaşma isteği kolektifin özfarkındalık ve özgünlük kavramlarıyla oldukça örtüşmektedir.

Tüm bunlar göz önüne alındığında, bu tez Rivolta Femminile’nin feminist söylemlerini yeniden ele alarak, hem sanatçı Carla Accardi hem de mimar Marta Lonzi’nin ataerkil kültüre verdikleri farklı tepkileri analiz etmeyi ve bu iki kadının sanat ve mimarlık alanlarına yaptıkları katkıyı mimarlık tarihinde yeniden değerlendirmeyi amaçlamıştır. Böylelikle, bu çalışma önemli bir feminist kolektifin tasarım süreçlerine ve mekân üretimine yönelik bıraktığı belirgin etkiyi, bu mekânları, süreçleri ve aktörleri tarih yazımında görünür hale getirmeyi hedeflemektedir.

185

B: TEZ İZİN FORMU / THESIS PERMISSION FORM

ENSTİTÜ / INSTITUTE

Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences

Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Social Sciences

Uygulamalı Matematik Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Applied Mathematics

Enformatik Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Informatics

Deniz Bilimleri Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Marine Sciences

YAZARIN / AUTHOR

Soyadı / Surname : ERDOĞAN Adı / Name : KÜBRA NESRİN Bölümü / Department : MİMARLIK TARİHİ

TEZİN ADI / TITLE OF THE THESIS (İngilizce / English) : RIVOLTA FEMMINILE, CARLA ACCARDI, MARTA LONZI: FEMINISM, ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALY

TEZİN TÜRÜ / DEGREE: Yüksek Lisans / Master Doktora / PhD

1. Tezin tamamı dünya çapında erişime açılacaktır. / Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

2. Tez iki yıl süreyle erişime kapalı olacaktır. / Secure the entire work for patent and/or proprietary purposes for a period of two years. *

3. Tez altı ay süreyle erişime kapalı olacaktır. / Secure the entire work for period of six months. *

* Enstitü Yönetim Kurulu kararının basılı kopyası tezle birlikte kütüphaneye teslim edilecektir. A copy of the decision of the Institute Administrative Committee will be delivered to the library together with the printed thesis.

Yazarın imzası / Signature ...... Tarih / Date …………………………

186